His HeartbeatHigh summer in the low Sierras. Day by blazing day, we dug clay, and fashioned it into form. By night, I learned another heat, a new geography: Brian’s body. I had become fluent in the touch that flows between us, but there is more to know. In a tiny A-frame cabin, darkness held us as we nestled together, my ear pressed against his chest. Beneath the arcing vault of his ribs, an ocean sounded, waves pounding unevenly.“Do you hear it?” he asked dreamily“Hm?” I whispered“My heart murmur.”“The shusshing ?”“Um-hum—there’s a little hole between my heart chambers.”I think of the Japanese climbing kiln that we were using to fire our pottery—the openings that allow the fire-path to ascend through the chambers.Voice resonant in his chest, he continued as he held me close, “It’s a heart defect. I was born that way. So the blood flows through the hole and makes that extra ssssssh at the end”That night, I kept listening to his heart’s improvisation: a steady beat doubling in echo and whoosh reverberating. Over that summer, close to him, I listened again and again, dreaming into that hidden generosity.Decades later, I no longer have any of the pots I made during that pottery residency. I have lost touch with Brian. But when I am diagnosed with a rare cardiac condition, and I hear my own murmur, I remember that intimacy—Brian’s rhythm that I knew by heart, an audible foreshadowing.Note: this piece appears in a slightly differnt form in " Heart's Oratorio: One Woman's Journey through Love, Death and Modern Medicine" where it is titled "Murmuring"