Liebestod: The Haunted Gondola by Charles Bryant 

It's always a pleasure to hear you read Charles. This is a tour de force. I learn so much from your poetry. Thank you!

Impressive poem, Charles. You appear very well and strong, also impressive. I have been watching Brian Cox---BBC videos on the universe. Science is quite wonderful----but in the end of everything we are nothing----equally amazing.

i'm lucky to find such a gem. Your suave voice is a golden ornament that wrapps it.

Liebestod:The Haunted Gondola Light has filtered through this aperture for many many years. But light is not eternal. Smooth quality of skin enraptures to be sure. Still the so-called spirit fades, goes out. remixed or lost among the shifting stars. Sleep satisfies; sleep and lascivious curves which though temporal remain in memory. He smiles and is desirable. Desire is the fixture, stays the same. Low, flat and wind-swept; bleak and bare. One solitary pinnacle admonishes the rock and sandy waste. One alleviating image signifies the lapsing of inscrutable power. The vast spaces dull with whirling dust, shriek with driven air. Palazzo Vendramin, Venezia. Eighteen hundred and eighty-three. Time is sometimes tilted on its side to let the future through. Even the softest music is too much. Silence alone suffices. Superfluous words overspill and readily drain away. From the underside of a low Venetian sky a steady drizzle descends and drenches him. Water slurping, sucking along the wall. Black prow of the tethered gondola rises and falls hypnotically. The old man stares and stares hearing his inner music. Porous stone weathered by hundreds of years, Venetian magic. He blindly gropes at the crumbling balustrade, wrinkled brown skin against the dirty grey, watches the lacquered prow of the bucking craft, diminutive longboat of the southern shore, awaiting its dying Siegfried. As if breathing upon the turbid tide its struggling last. Close the windows. Draw the curtains. Shut the image out. The whole place stinks of death and of decay. Death and Venice intertwined, made one, the universal plague. Music from the drawing room laments Rhinemaidens' loss, the stolen gold. Vacuity wells from the vast space underfoot, the void of nothing, the enduring hell. (But yet the void is love - how can that be?) To fall would be to fall a thousand years, headlong to darkness. He staggers to the bed, collapses there, feels the tug of emptiness, primeval evil. Closes his eyes and prays. 'Infinite wisdom, infinite passion, guard me. Infinite inspiration come, be mine.' ___________________________________ With softest fingers sleep carresses him with silken touch, the dreamily luscious lips upon his flesh. Then another angel comes one that sat whistling by an empty tomb whose whistling turned to music. He would sing of man's redemption, but with such a face as made a mock of all his promising words. A third figure emerges from the gloom, a smiling youth with curled and amorous hair waved on either side a handsome face and clustered at the smooth skin of the nape where flounced and golden lace frothed in a foam. An eighteenth century lordling, lithe and tall, radiating healthful masculine beauty. He seemed to know the sleeper. Bending down, he placed a cool kiss on his burning brow and stroked his furrowed cheeks with tender touch. And all the while the music in the air vibrated through the chamber and the palace and filled the void. Matter was transposed to spirit, the dance began of intermixing sense and muscularity, thought become movement, action stylised art forming endless frescoes of desire, flesh on flesh. Old and young were interchanged and melted one into the other, raptured, joined. A little later, the joined were set apart, regained their separate spheres. ____________________________________ The lace-clad figure nodded to him; he followed. Age led by beauty down the marble stairs and out into the open. Dark waterway rain-pocked, running deep. The waiting gondola rising and falling in restless waving motion. The wind blew chill along the bleak canal. With a furtive movement the brilliant youth ducked into the boat and sat; benign, held back the curtain, smiled and beckoned, half-clouded eyes alive with smouldering fire, passion's deep depravity unchained, ready to erupt and flood the senses. The lordling lay back against the cushions, smirking, his muscular legs thrown nonchalantly open, beringed long fingers playing with his crotch that momently swelled and stretched the satin smoothness. A buzzing was in the air, a high loud buzzing that overwhelmed the senses. There, beside the youth, the dreamer's host, Lord of the Ring and Parsifal, sat gazing in the younger composer's eyes as if he knew him - Monteverdi, Scarlatti, lords of song, it hardly mattered which. The lordling placed a jewel on his fingers; Wagner sat amazed at the costly gift. Then the gondola began to sway and buck as though an earthquake or a tidal wave engulfed it, and there! - the Rhinemaidens song was on the air. the music of the Rhine was everywhere. Scarlatti was laughing as if deranged, Valhalla's fall was over them all, the well-built edifice collapsing - death had come. The priest clambered out of the rocking gondola, hearing a shriek of pain and of despair that echoed off the stonework and out across the water, clasping his crucifix close against his breast, filled with dread and wonder and the fear of mortality. Wagner bellowed and fell back among the cushions, Scarlatti bending over him insanely laughing. The rocking ceased; the gondola was still. Wide-eyed Cosima came down the stairs, now widowed. The wind blew chill upon the bleak canal. Far off was heard the howling of a dog.