Her clothes are made of rainbows And twenty thousand tears Shine through the spaces Of her golden ochre hair

She knew intellectually that he was beautiful, the way the iridescent wings of a carrion fly would be.

She loved him with too clear a vision to fear his cloudiness

Just as a prism refracts light differently when you change its angle, each experience of love illuminates love in new ways, drawing from an infinite palette of patterns and hues.

She took off her dark glasses and squinted at me. It was as though her eyes were shattered prisms, the dots of blue and gray and green like broken bits of sparkle.

It was in looking up at him her aspect had caught its lustre - the light repeated in her eyes beamed first out of his.

When she saw him face to face their eyes met and brushed like birds’ wings. After that everything was all right, everything was wonderful, she knew that he was beginning to fall in love with her.

She had never loved him so much as she did in that instant.

She saw his dreamer eyes; the dream was love, togetherness, two people together.
She saw his whole dreamer self, and she called his name. (p297)

But one thing it opened her eyes to, and made certain from the first instant of her new consciousness, namely, that since she loved him she could not keep her promise to marry him.

In and out of my heart flowed my rainbow blood.

Vision

The rainbow touched down
'somewhere in the Rio Grande,'
we said. And saw the light of it
from your mother's house in Isleta.
How it curved down between earth
and the deepest sky to give us horses
of color
horses that were within us all of this time
but we didn't see them because
we wait for the easiest vision
to save us.

In Isleta the rainbow was a crack
in the universe. We saw the barest
of all life that is possible.
Bright horses rolled over
and over the dusking sky.
I heard the thunder of their beating
hearts. Their lungs hit air
and sang. All the colors of horses
formed the rainbow,
and formed us
watching them.

He looked at her
Something
Turned cancerous
He was in love.

One by one they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age. He thought of how she who lay beside him had locked in her heart for so many years that image of her lover’s eyes when he had told her that he did not wish to live.