Dan Albergotti

Listening to Hounds of Love Today

I’m looking into the eye of the squirrel
that’s fallen from the tree and trying to see

if there’s still life there or if there’s only
the reflection of clouds. And I’m happy

everyone’s listening to “Running Up That Hill”
this summer, and so is the magical Kate Bush

(she’s said so), and God, who wouldn’t be?
That song was forty years ahead of its time,

it seems, so now I can be insufferably smug
when I say I loved it in 1985 and love being

still alive in 2022 to see the rest of the world
just starting to catch up after running uphill

for decades. I’m pretty sure the squirrel
is already dead. I’m pretty sure the world

is already dead, filled as it is with older people
who refuse to feel anything and younger people

who don’t listen to whole albums anymore.
“Running Up That Hill” is great, but I prefer

the second song on Kate’s Hounds of Love—
the “title track,” as it’s called. I love how it begins

with that man’s panicked voice surrounded
by heavy drums: It’s in the trees! It’s coming!

And immediately you’re right there, right where
the last drone of “Running Up That Hill” had left you:

a place that’s wondrous and strange and alive
and more than a little terrifying. I almost believe

I can see the reflection of my own stunned face
in the squirrel’s coal-black eye, the same face

that watched the eye of a sparrow slowly close
over minutes as the bird lay on patio brick

below the plate-glass window it had struck
while my father sat in his recliner, oblivious,

being one of those older people who feel nothing.
My own face, but younger—so not really me.

The same face, the same skull, not the same mind.
The same life moving, as ever, toward its end.

The careful attention I paid to that bird’s death
annoyed the hell out of that man who worked hard

to feel nothing. When my father would put out
the family cat for the night, he’d pick her up

in one hand, open the door, and then hurl her
into the dark. I always wondered why he felt the need

to show his own son how much he didn’t care.
When I was a child, I would look at animals in a way

that made me seem to float away from others, beyond
their voices, wholly lost. I would have to be startled

or shaken back into this world. I’d talk to dogs
and scold them when they got up, shook,

and walked away. I’d stare for what seemed
like hours at frogs and crickets in roadside ditches.

I stopped cold when, as I walked to kindergarten,
the flattened carcass of a cat swam into the circle

of my vision, the world given to my bent head.
Since, I’ve always wondered how my mother

could not have seen that body before I did,
my small hand in hers. When I was a child

are the first five words out of Kate’s mouth
on “Hounds of Love,” and that song lives

in the innocent fear of a world too large
for everything small. And when she sings

in the second verse about the dog-caught fox
that lets her take him in her hands, and how

his little heart, it beat so fast, my own heart
trembles every time. Does yours? Do you hear

what I hear there, reader? Do you know
Kate knows what we know? Are you happy?

This squirrel’s eye is so black—obsidian, jet—
I can hardly believe it could ever see anything

but void. But nothing’s ever truly empty, is it?
There’s always something there in the dark.

Sometimes when I’m alone I’ll suddenly feel
as if something’s coming through the trees

or through the clouds or through the rain
or through the past or through the future,

and I’ll feel that tingle run up my spine,
the same one I feel whenever I imagine,

without trying to, how losing control
of a car on a busy highway might feel.

The imagination is dangerous. It can be
like a dog that’s been trained so well it starts

to teach itself new tricks, stops waiting
for commands. Brings you things unasked for.

Imagine that dog of the imagination
turning out to be one of those breeds that,

as some people say, “will turn on you,”
one that’s hard-wired to bite the hand that feeds,

that will lift its sweet, once-puppy face
up to you and give a frothing, curled-lip snarl.

Bad imagination, learning its own tricks.
Like when it gives you the image of your dog,

your real one, on the table at the vet’s office,
gazing into your face as you meet her forehead

with yours the moment the needle slides into her vein
some undetermined time in the near or far future.

Do you ever find yourself sobbing in the shower
over something that hasn’t happened and might not

for a very long time, if ever? Are you happy?
Keats said he never counted upon any happiness,

but only lived in the moment of its arrival.
In that letter he said a sunset could make him happy,

or the sight of a sparrow before his window
picking about the Gravel. That was November, 1817.

Four years later he was dead. And I’m happy
that everyone is listening to “Running Up That Hill,”

but I wish they’d listen to all of Hounds of Love
because context matters in art, don’t you think?

You read that bit about Keats using the imagination
to cast himself into the sparrow’s existence,

to “pick about the gravel” himself, in a different way
if you know about the coughed-up blood in Rome.

You stand before the Throne of the Third Heaven
in a different way when you learn that Hampton

earned his Bronze Star and then spent all his days
of those fourteen years pushing mops and brooms.

You listen to “Atmosphere” in a different way
knowing Ian will soon walk away into eternal silence.

Maybe you read this poem in a different way
if you’ve read “Affirmation of Faith” in The Boatloads.

And you craft the art of your life in a different way
when you feel something coming through the trees.

Have you seen that home video the family made
of releasing the orphaned bunny they’d nursed

to health? They had wanted to capture its leap
into a free and happy life, and there is a leap—

it bounds out of its crate in the camera’s shaky frame
with something you think must be a pure joy

for about twenty feet before ascending into heaven
in the talons of a hawk. Oh, here I go—yet again—

following that old dog into memory and dread
and pulling you with me, reader. Forgive me.

But listen to this too: I once saved some baby squirrels
when their nest fell to the ground outside my window,

knocked from the tree’s high limb by another hawk.
They were tiny, stunned, their eyes still closed,

and I picked them up one by one and delivered them
into a low crook of the same tree. And then my wife

and I watched as the mother squirrel recovered each,
carrying it in her mouth to somewhere else—beyond,

we could hope, the eye of a hawk. And I was happy
because I saved them, I saved them, I saved them

for this, I now think, looking into a jet-black eye.
Lazarus died a second time, you know. Still,

we have now. Maybe we can be happy now.
A good start might be listening to a whole album

because that can give you entirely, if momentarily,
a new life in a way that a single song never really can.

Because if you’ve never heard how “Summer’s Cauldron”
bleeds into “Grass,” then you’ve never heard “Grass.”

And if you’ve never heard the beat of “Train in Vain”
sneak up from that brief moment of silence just after

“Four Horsemen” has blended into “I’m Not Down”
and “I’m Not Down” has blended into “Revolution Rock,”

presumably closing out the greatest album ever made,
then you’ve certainly never heard “Train in Vain.”

And if you’ve never heard “Hollywood” arise
from the embers of Ghosteen’s first ten tracks,

then you’ve never heard “Hollywood,” nor felt
its ephemeral, gargantuan weight on your chest.

And if you’ve never heard the faint rustle of brittle leaves
moved by a cold, autumnal wind after you’ve come home

from having the dog put down, then you’ve never heard
the rasp and wheeze of your own final breath.

And if you’ve never heard the rasp and wheeze
of your own final breath, you’re going to find it hard

to begin the difficult business of living this life well.
So young people, listen to me. Listen to an album. Now.

Turn your phones off and throw them in the lake.
Drop the vinyl on the turntable. Drop the needle

in the outer groove and close your eyes for an hour.
And older people, try to remember when you felt

something, maybe when you listened to your own
favorite album, the one you’ve forgotten about,

and how the world then seemed right for an hour,
and how that near-silence felt holy as the needle

tracked quickly across the innermost groove
before the tonearm lifted like a bird and came to rest

with a click. Maybe listen to that album again today.
It’s not too late to be happy, to re-make a soul.

I’d join you if I could, but right now I have to cover
the reflection of my eyes with this soft, broken soil,

then use the shovel’s dull face to tamp it down.

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Dan Albergotti is the author of The Boatloads (BOA Editions, 2008), Millennial Teeth (Southern Illinois University Press, 2014), and Candy (LSU Press, 2024), as well as the chapbooks Of Air and Earth and Circa MMXX (Unicorn Press, 2019 and 2022). His poems have appeared in 32 Poems, Birmingham Poetry Review, The Cincinnati Review, Copper Nickel, Four Way Review, The Southern Review, The Best American Poetry and The Pushcart Prize among other journals and anthologies. He lives in Tampa, Florida.