ANNIVERSARIUM
XVI:
SON
OF DRACULA
I was the pale boy with spindly arms
the undernourished bookworm
dressed in baggy hand-me-downs
(plaid shirts my father wouldn’t
wear,
cut down and sewn by my mother),
old shoes in tatters, squinting all day
for need of glasses that no one would buy.
At nine, at last, they told me
I could cross the line
to the adult part of the library
those dusty classic shelves
which no one ever seemed to touch.
I raced down the aisles,
to G for Goethe and Faust
reached up for Frankenstein
at Shelley, Mary
(not pausing at Percy
Bysshe!)
then trembled at lower S
to find my most desired,
most dreamt-of —
Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
Dracula! His doomed guest!
The vampire brides! His long, slow
spider-plot of coming to England
to drain its aristocratic blood!
His power over wolves and bats,
and a red-eyed vermin horde!
To be, himself, a bat
or a cloud of mist,
to rest in earth
throughout the classroom day!
This was the door to years of dreams,
and waking dreams of dreams.
I lay there nights,
the air from an open window chilling me,
waiting for the bat,
the creeping mist,
the leaping wolf
the caped, lean stranger.
Lulled by the lap of curtains, the false
sharp scuttle of scraping leaves,
I knew the night as the dead must know it,
waiting in caskets, dressed
in opera-house clothes
that no one living could afford to wear.
But I was not in London. Not even close.
The American river town
of blackened steeples,
vile taverns and shingled miseries
had no appeal to Dracula. Why would he come
when we could offer no castle,
no Carfax Abbey, no teeming streets
from which to pluck a victim?
My life--it seemed so unimportant then —
lay waiting for its sudden terminus,
its sleep and summoning to an Undead
sundown. How grand it would have been
to rise as the adopted son of Dracula!
I saw it all:
how no one would come to my grave
to see my casket covered with loam.
My mother and her loutish husband
would drink the day away at the Moose Club;
my brother would sell my books
to buy new baseball cards;
my teachers’ minds slate clean
forgetting me, the passer-through.
(Latin I would miss,
but would Latin miss me?)
No one would hear the summoning
as my new father called me:
Nosferatu! Arise! Arise! Nosferatu!
And I would rise,
slide out of soil
like a snake from its hollow.
He would touch my torn throat.
The wound would vanish.
He would teach me the art of flight,
the rules of the hunt
the secret of survival.
I would not linger
in this awful town for long.
One friend, perhaps,
I’d make into a pale companion,
another my slave, to serve my daytime needs
(guarding my coffin,
disposing of blood-drained bodies) —
what were friends for, anyway?
As for the rest
of this forsaken hive of humankind,
I wouldn’t deign to drink its blood,
the dregs of Europe
We would move on
to the cities,
to Pittsburgh first, of course,
our mist and bat-flight
unnoticed in its steel-mill choke-smoke.
The pale aristocrat and his thin son
attending the Opera, the Symphony,
mingling at Charity Balls,
Robin to his Batman,
cape shadowing cape,
fang for fang his equal soon
at choosing whose life
deserved abbreviation.
A fine house we’d have
(one of several hideouts)
a private crypt below
with the best marbles
the finest silk, mahogany,
brass
for the coffin fittings,
our Undead mansion above
filled to the brim with books and
music.
I waited, I waited —
He
never arrived.
At thirteen, I had a night-long nosebleed,
as though my Undead half had bitten me,
drinking from within. I woke in white
of hospital bed, my veins refreshed
with the hot blood of strangers.
I had not been awake to enjoy it!
I would never even know from whom it came.
Tombstones gleamed across the hill,
lit up all night in hellish red
from the never-sleeping iron furnaces.
Leaves danced before the wardroom windows,
blew out and up to a vampire moon.
I watched it turn from copper to crimson,
its bloating fall to treeline,
its deliberate feeding
on corpuscles of oak and maple,
one baleful eye unblinking.
A nurse brought in a tiny radio
One hour a night of symphony
was all the beauty this city could endure —
I held it close to my ear, heard Berlioz’s
Fantastic Symphony: the gallows
march,
the artist’s Undead resurrection
amid the Witches’ Sabbath —
my resurrection.
I asked for paper.
The pen leaped forth and suddenly I knew
that I had been transformed.
I was a being of Night, I was Undead
since all around me were Unalive.
I had turned the sounds of Berlioz
and his aural witches’ sabbath into words,
and the words, the images of night winds,
sulky witch sarabandes and wizards’ orgies,
a hilltop of animal-demon-human frenzy.
The Vampire father never had to come.
I was my own father, self-made
from death’s precipice.
I saw what they could not see,
walked realms of night and solitude
where law and rule and custom crumbled.
I was a poet.
I would feed on Beauty for blood,
I would make wings of words,
I would shun the Cross of
complacency.
A cape would trail behind me always.
