Laurie Anderson, Kronos Quartet - Nothing Left But Their Names lyrics

Now recently, i got a book – listing all the
Animal species that have disappeared off the
Face of the Earth called 'All the
Disappeared Animal Lifeforms of the World'
Now the list is really impressive and it
Included all the dates and territories
Where the animals were last seen or
Wherever the last fossil was unearthed

Now, as you probably know:
999% of the species
Who ever lived are now extinct so this
Is a very long list
– including massive numbers
Of civets, big subsets of spotted lizards
Every last Mastodon the short based
Bear the sabertooths fifteen chapters
On sloths and one whole chapter
On the one-eared dinosaur

Now, it was amazing you cannot imagine how
Many kinds of weasels have come and
Gone now the publishers claim that the book
Is a definitive masterpiece in fact
According to them – the book actually weighs
Approximately forty weasels and so
Goodbye to the disappeared ones
There they go
Hopping and jumping away swimming
And floating away gone forever vaporized
As if they'd never existed except for a few
Bones and footprints nothing left
But their names

You know
The first letter in the Hebrew alphabet
Is Aleph and the letter
Aleph actually has no sound it's
A letter with no sound
A mender letter so, to say
Aleph, you open your mouth, and
You think of the letter, and
You start to say it
And then you stop and that is Aleph

Now, that's the thing with words – they
Leave so much to the imagination
Like in Yoga class where the teacher
Is saying things like: "Now
Imagine your breath is filling
The entire room or imagine that your
Legs are planted on the ground, and they
Keep going down, and down
And down underground
Like roots" At fifteen feet down
And you know that actually you feel that
And really
They could just go on and on in this
Vein, like: "Now imagine that
You've swallowed your head, and it's
Inside your stomach and you're upside down
And you can't open
Your eyes, and you're completely stuck
In there" You know, things like that

But, I have to say
It often is much better to talk
About things – than to actually
Do them take for example
A very long expedition to the North Pole

Now, you know the reason that I really love
The stars – is that we cannot hurt
Them we can't burn, we can't melt them or
Make them overflow we can't flood them
Or blow them up or turn them out but we
Are reaching for them we
Are reaching for them

And, ah yes
The moon and the stars are up there
Like acquaintances, that we always
Meant to befriend yes
I meant to learn their names but for
Various reasons having to do with lack of
Time – and lack of ambition
– I never did do that and
They remained up in the sky
As nameless as if we'd never been here at all