Body

Wings of Desire - Wim Wenders (1987); Cinematography by Henri Alekan

Eurydice by Arseniy Tarkovsky

A person has one body,
Singleton, all on its own,
The soul has had more than enough
Of being cooped up inside
A casing with ears and eyes
The size of a five-penny piece
And skin - just scar after scar -
Covering a structure of bone.

Out through the cornea it flies
Into the bowl of the sky,
On to an icy spoke,
To a wheeling flight of birds,
And hears through the barred window
Of its living prison-cell
The crackle of forests and corn-fields
The trumpet of seven seas.

A bodyless soul is sinful
Like a body without a shirt -
No intention, nothing ever gets done,
No inspiration, never a line.
A riddle with no solution:
Who is going to come back
After dancing on the dance-floor
Where there's nobody to dance?

Run along then, child, don't fret
Over poor Eurydice,
Bowl your copper hoop along
Whip it through the world,
So long as even quarter pitch
With cheerful tone and cold
In answer to each step you take
The earth rings in your ears.

Poem found in Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time (Austin, Tx: University of Texas Press, 1986), p. 157. Translated by Kitty Hunter-Blair