Diane and the Smokies

Afloat in a pond of July sunshine and mesmerized

by the waterfall’s pounding cascade onto granite slabs

below, there came a day when suddenly she stood up

in the stream of all of it, locked her freckled eyes

onto spruce treetops a mile up the mountain and,

like an ecstatic animal, burst into such laughter, such

utter freedom gifted by purity of water and rock

and wind, that three hawks circling high overhead

ceased their incessant hunt for this moment, becoming

points of stillness, love’s witnesses in the great sky

of her hard-won joy.