Fabrica (Andreas Vesalius)"

Lyrics

[Verse 1]
You were twenty-eight
when you published the correction
thirteen centuries overdue —
Galen dissected Barbary macaques
and called the results human
and the professors stood at the lectern
and read his descriptions
while barber-surgeons cut below
and the distance
between the voice and the knife
was the entire history of the error
You closed it:
picked up the blade yourself
and the somatosensory cortex
that guided your fingers
was the first one in thirteen hundred years
that trusted the hand
more than the book

[Verse 2]
The Fabrica —
seven volumes,
two hundred woodcuts,
the flayed figures posed
in Paduan countryside
as though death
were a regional activity
performed outdoors in good light
The pages smelled
like fresh-cut boxwood
and the bite of lamp-black ink
pressed into linen rag
by a man who understood
that the body must be drawn beautifully
to be remembered correctly
because the visual cortex
does not store
what it has not been given
a reason to admire

[Chorus]
You stood in the anatomy theater —
the circular room,
students rising in tiers
like a choir assembled
to witness
what the hippocampus
had been storing wrong
for sixty generations:
the jaw is one bone, not two,
the sternum three segments, not seven,
and the liver
has the number of lobes
it has always had
which Galen would have counted correctly
if Galen had opened a human
instead of a macaque
and called it close enough

[Outro]
You were condemned,
sent on pilgrimage,
shipwrecked on the island of Zakynthos
and died at fifty
with the hands
that corrected thirteen centuries
of inherited guessing
empty
on a beach
that did not know
whose fingers it was burying
The Fabrica is still in print —
the prefrontal cortex
learns the same lesson
in every discipline eventually:
do not trust the voice
at the lectern
if the voice has never once
picked up the knife
and checked