“The park is high. And as out of a houseI step out of its glimmering half-lightinto openness and evening. Into the wind,the same wind that the clouds feel,the bright rivers and the turning millsthat stand slowly grinding at the sky's edge.Now I too am a thing held in its hand,the smallest thing under the sky. --Look:Is that one sky?: Blissfully lucid blue,into which ever purer clouds throng,and under it all white in endless changes,and over it that huge, thin-spun gray,pulsing warmly as on red underpaint,and over everything this silent radianceof a setting sun. Miraculous structure,moved within itself and upheld by itself,shaping figures, giant wings, faultsand high mountain ridges before the first starand suddenly, there: a gate into suchdistances as perhaps only birds know...”

“‎Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.So you mustn’t be frightened, if a sadness rises in front of you, larger than any you have ever seen; if an anxiety, like light and cloud-shadows, moves over your hands and over everything you do. You must realize that something is happening to you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand and will not let you fall.”

“You, Beloved, who are all the gardens I have ever gazed at, longing. An open window in a country house-- , and you almost stepped out, pensive, to meet me. Streets that I chanced upon,-- you had just walked down them and vanished. And sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors were still dizzy with your presence and, startled, gave back my too-sudden image. Who knows? Perhaps the same bird echoed through both of us yesterday, separate, in the evening...”

“To make myself understood and to diminish the distance between us, I called out: “I am an evening cloud too.” They stopped still, evidently taking a good look at me. Then they stretched towards me their fine, transparent, rosy wings. That is how evening clouds greet each other. They had recognized me.”

“Ah, not to be cut off,not through the slightest partitionshut out from the law of the stars.The inner -- what is it?if not the intensified sky,hurled through with birds and deepwith the winds of homecoming.”

“Whoever you are: in the evening step outof your room, where you know everything; yours is the last house before the far-off:whoever you are. With your eyes, which in their wearinessbarely free themselves from the worn-out threshold, you lift very slowly one black treeand place it against the sky: slender, alone.And you have made the world. And it is hugeand like a word which grows ripe in silence. And as your will seizes on its meaning,tenderly your eyes let it go...”

“You who never arrived in my arms, Beloved, who were lost from the start, I don't even know what songs would please you. I have given up trying to recognize you in the surging wave of the next moment. All the immense images in me -- the far-off, deeply-felt landscape, cities, towers, and bridges, and un-suspected turns in the path, and those powerful lands that were once pulsing with the life of the gods-- all rise within me to mean you, who forever elude me. You, Beloved, who are all the gardens I have ever gazed at, longing. An open window in a country house-- , and you almost stepped out, pensive, to meet me. Streets that I chanced upon,-- you had just walked down them and vanished. And sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors were still dizzy with your presence and, startled, gave back my too-sudden image. Who knows? Perhaps the same bird echoed through both of us yesterday, separate, in the evening... ”