That earth itself is heaven is the prominent theme of "Falling" which tells of a flight attendant, the stewardess, who becomes a goddess as she falls from an airplane and strikes the ground, in which she becomes embedded.
The theme of the natural heaven is reinforced by descriptions of the spiritual effects on farmers and others who observe the woman during and after her fall.
The woman's fall is described as a transitional stage between spiritual blindness and illumination, a movement from death-in-life to fully realized life, even from sexual impotence to sexual power: as she descends "in the overwhelming middle of things," she removes her clothes, becoming more primitive, more natural, naked like an animal; she watches "her country lose its evoked master shape" and "get back its houses and peoples"; she becomes "the greatest thing that ever came to Kansas," causing farm girls to feel "the goddess in them struggle and rise" and causing widowers and boys to feet the stirrings of sexual desire. The woman's fall constitutes "her brief goddess / State," this brevity suggestive of the individual's role in the eternal round of life and death.
