Goldmund: Narcissus, you are a sophist. We'll never come together on that kind of road.

Narcissus: No road will bring us together.

Goldmund: Don't speak like that.

Narcissus: I'm serious. We are not meant to come together, not any more than sun and moon were meant to come together, or sea and land. We are sun and moon, dear friend, we are sea and land. It is not our purpose to become each other; it is to recognize each other, to learn to see the other and honor him for what he is: each the other's opposite and complement.

-- Hesse, from Narziss und Goldmund

dreaming under the lilacs

CVIII

Ah Love! could you and I with Fate conspire
To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire,
Would not we shatter it to bits—and then
Re-mould it nearer to the Heart’s Desire!

...

fragment of a springtime, the kind
of evening when the roads lead almost
off into the blue, but no one
moves; the dust of the roads recalls
the dust of the roads where most
are shot and the silence
tugs at stones, but nothing happens

somewhere something no one has
touched tumbles from a shelf,
perhaps as my grandmother stands
as she always has stood in her
kitchen and cooks up dried apricots;
I know she is dead, but their scent
is so strong that the body sensing it

it becomes fruit itself; and as
the fruit is hung up in the nearest
tree, which may be a birch that
bears catkins, never apricots,
the shot sounds beforehand, ahead
of just after, its sound like a
door with no house standing wide open still

-- Inger Christensen, from Alphabet