From An Airplane

FROM AN AIRPLANE / Alan Williamson From an airplane the two valley towns seem equal to each other, along the axis of the mountains, though the only road between snakes twenty—thirty? mUes to the north, where narrowing canyons open the possibUity. You hold the two in your eye as in God's hand, the same statistical print-out of roofs, gone blank with snow; and think how if you lived there you would love, hate, marry someone in the next five houses; perhaps never get as far as the mirror-town, before you died; or if you started to walk there, how measuredly the cold would rise in your boots with the first, the second field. Where you'll land, it's just less visible. In the many streets and cubicles, someone, just separated, feels the dead years in his furniture as a measure like cold in his bootsoles; or he turns back, stays married, and the unlived town stays in the empty balance . . . But the restaurants hide it more, the headUnes, the friends. On the whole you'd rather be up here forever, where the fact that the earth curves is actually visible, blued with its unexperienceable other time; not come down at all—unless, of course, you could live like the Acoma people, stunned for centuries with the sense of being at the center. It could absorb anything, even the Cross: they carried beams thirty miles on their shoulders from Taylor Mountain, and any that touched the ground couldn't be used in the church roof; they were tapered to candy-cane-colored "candles" for the reredos. In their pottery, one is always at the center of interlocking weather—sweeps and stairways of black, with the little triangles inside them meaning lightning. It's one of 268 · The Missouri Review the thinnest potteries in the world. The ingredients come from the four directions: north for blackness, south for white slip, east for yellow slip, west for clay. Alan Williamson THE MISSOURI REVIEW · 269 ...