Buck Rogers (Reprise)

Lyrics

First, the animal.
A fall buck, its hide thick against the coming cold.
Stretched on a frame in a trading post that smells of woodsmoke and damp earth.
Before the coin, this was the unit.
This was the measure.
A value you could run your hand across, feel the grain of.
A currency with a heartbeat, once.
And the name sheds its skin.
From the back of a deer, to the back of a bill.
From a buckskin, to a buck.
Then it makes the great leap…
To a name for a man who flies between the stars.
How does a word travel that far?
The quiet chain.
Then the word leaves the forest.
It lives in pockets, in purses, in folded leather wallets.
No one remembers the weight of the hide.
They just know the sound.
The quick, clean slang passed over a counter.
A ghost of the animal, haunting the grammar of the price.
A story forgotten in the saying of the word.
And the name sheds its skin.
From the back of a deer, to the back of a bill.
From a buckskin, to a buck.
Then it makes the great leap…
To a name for a man who flies between the stars.
How does a word travel that far?
The quiet chain.
August, nineteen hundred and twenty-eight.
The dry rustle of a pulp magazine, Amazing Stories.
Philip Nowlan writes a man named Anthony Rogers, a soldier lost in time.
Then January seventh, 'twenty-nine.
Dick Calkins gives him a face for the newspaper page.
And Anthony is gone.
He's just... Buck.
A good, simple name.
A name with a history he could never know.
A name that meant value, long before he had it.
From a deer in the quiet woods of the eighteenth century...
To a word for a dollar...
To a hero in a rocket ship in the twenty-fifth.
Just... Buck.