Nothing Left but Their Names

You know, 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"
You know 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
99.9% 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-faced bear, the sabertooth
Fifteen chapters on sloths
And one whole chapter on the one-eared dinosaur

You know, it was amazing
You cannot imagine how many kinds of weasels have come and gone
Y'know 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