Even as children they were late sleepers,

preferring their dreams, even when quick with monsters,

to the world with all its breakable toys,

its compacts with the dying.

*

From the stretched arms of whitered trees

they turned, fearing contagion of the mortal,

and even under the plums of summer

drifted like winter moons.

*

Secret, unfriendly, pale, possessed

of the one wish, the thirst for mere survival,

they came, as all extremists do

in time, to a sort of grandeur:

now, to they Balkans battlements

above the vulgar town of their first lives,

they rise at the moon’s rising. Strange

that their utter self-concern

should, in the end, have left them selfless:

mirrors fail to perceive them as they float

trough the great hall and up the staircase;

nor are the cobwebs broken.

*

Into the pallid night emerging,

wrapped in their flapping capes, routinely maddened

by a wolf’s cry, they stand for a moment

stoking the mind’s eye.

*

With lewd thoughts of the pressed flowers

and bric-a-brac of rooms with something to lose,

of love-dismembered dolls, and children

buried in quiet sleep.

*

Then they are off in a negative frenzy,

their black shapes cropped into sudden bats

that swarm, burst, and are gone. Thinking

of a thrush cold in the leaves.

*

Who has sung his few summers truly,

or an old scholar resting his eyes at last,

we cannot be much impressed with vampires,

colorful though they are;

nevertheless, their pain is real,

and requires our pity. Think how sad it must be

to thirst always for a scorned elixir,

the salt quotidian blood

which, if mistrusted, has no savor;

to prey on life forever and not possess it,

as rock-hollows, tide after tide,

glassily strand the sea.

Richard Wilbur. USA (1921-2017)