On the monitor flashes a creature that’s nothing like a heart. The cardiologist says this is normal. I think there is nothing normal about having inside of your body an animal that jumps and stutters and stops beyond your will, wild even in grayscale on the doctor’s monitor. Outside, the elms branch into branches that bud with leaves; the trees collect their secrets in rings inside, truths they’ll tell only after the axe kills them. I think sometimes this is also true of the soul and the body and then I’m miserable, imagining that at the moment of death I’ll reveal every humiliation ringing its truth through my trunk. The cardiologist has no metaphors, just advice: less caffeine. More water. More walking. On the screen my heart is silent, still the floating ghost of a beast running weird in black and white. Then I’m outside; the elm has dropped the bright crescents of its leaves all over my car like a prophecy. None of us get out of this world without losing, without something of the self hitting the asphalt, hitting a high green note to howl out the history of how it felt to vanish under a tire’s tread.