Only the Footsteps Remain

Lyrics

[Intro]
(wind over mudstone, one soft footfall)
Ichnology. Not the animal. The animal's tracks.

[Verse 1]
There is a trackway in Tanzania, three and a half million years old,
where two of something walked across wet ash, side by side,
and one of them is smaller, and the smaller one's stride
matches the larger one's — which means they were walking together,
which means they were adjusting to each other, which means
one of them was slowing down. That's in the footprints. That's readable.

[Chorus]
Only the footsteps remain. No bones, no face, no name.
And it is somehow MORE, not less — a body is a thing that stopped,
a footprint is a thing that HAPPENED, an afternoon, a decision,
the exact weight of an animal at the moment it changed its mind.
Only the footsteps remain. And the footsteps are alive.
Somebody studies this. Somebody reads the walking.

[Verse 2]
You can see a dinosaur speed up. There are prints where the stride
lengthens over eleven paces, and the toes dig deeper at the front,
and something was chasing it, or it had decided to chase.
You can see one slip. There is a slide-mark and a recovery.
Three hundred million years ago something nearly fell over
and got its balance back, and we know, and it does not know we know.

[Chorus]

[Bridge]
And they never find the maker. That's the discipline's condition.
A trace fossil almost never comes with the animal attached.
So you name the TRACK, not the creature — the footprint gets a species,
and the thing that made it stays anonymous forever.
An entire taxonomy of behaviours by animals we cannot identify.
Verbs without nouns. The doing without the doer.

[Chorus]

[Outro]
(the wind, and nothing else)
Two of them.
Walking together. That's all we get. That's enough.