Pauses

Each time a story ends

There is such a long pause before another begins.

                                                          --Robert Bly, from “Looking at the Stars”

 

Those pauses seem interminable, even if only days:

the pause between test and result,

diagnosis and treatment plan, breach of trust

and forgiveness, death and resurrection.

Though the new story may truly start

at the end of the old, there is a time,

disorienting, when one knows not what to do,

when you are frozen in limbo,

when no path is visible. The shock

of ending holds us fast, and though painful,

it is good to be held, to be kept from

stumbling any deeper into the chasm

between stories. The pause has its own story.

Listen.