Title: The Rake's Progress
Author: Brown, Paul Cameron
Language: English
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  THE RAKE'S PROGRESS

  Paul Cameron Brown



  Published by
  South Western Ontario Poetry

  Copyright Paul Cameron Brown 1980



  THE RAKE'S PROGRESS

  I borrow De Quincey's Confessions
  of an Opium Eater, the aforementioned
  an account of that singular
  Oriental vice,
  whereupon misplacing the volume
  in transit
  from the checkpoint, I attempt
  to capsulize
  the book's misadventures only to
  suffer taciturnity
  on the part of the staff until,
  the duplicity
  of a continued numbers game in
  Chinese wearing
  thin and with lassitude similar to
  the opium habit,
  the Chief Librarian, a girl herself
  of Eastern domesticity
  greets my queries with hushed tones
  and solemnity akin to
  a leering Siamese or bedridden
  Cheshire cat.



  REGALIA

  If the rich are different
  they show it with the
  clarity of their table
  as Fitzgerald decried,
  the breathless hush
  of their garden regalias,
  the manner in which wedgewood
  crystal are cleaned to a
  polished exactness--
  the shimmer of expensive china
  no less repetitive than
  the hulking boys
  waiting in window stops,
  monsoon rain pelting
  the upper Punjab plains.



  DESIRE

  Sleep is a striking woman
  accosted by various men
  while in a dance;
  the warring desires thus
  present themselves as on
  a battlefield--
  hunger comes arrayed with
  red plumes to befit
  his appetites,
  sensuality somewhat
  decked out as a dandy
  in a mauve waistcoat
  and, of course, there is
  Fear, the most thwarted
  of the suitors, bejewelled with a
  flashing sabre, rattling it from
  the tail of his skinny stick horse,
  the pale charger riding
  to intercept the beautiful courtesan
  Sleep
  bestowing her favours illicitly
  wherein she would but choose.



  PONDICHERRY

  Chess pieces resting upon the jade
  mantle piece
  see sampans move quietly
  thru warm night,
  rich bundles of bougainvillea
  crowd market squares
  where deck chairs extend
  to the Persian Gulf.

  Leisured gentlemen
  finger walking canes,
  hold eyelids thick as goblets,
  sharp tridents beside private lairs.

  Skin in puffy whiteness bulges under
  lamp's white glare, becomes copra
  gathered
  miles from Pondicherry, sesame oil
  in rotting casks.

  And the Indian heat, closing with
  certitude
  akin to the trance of the snake
  charmer,
  holds his flute poised with the
  Bengali lancer
  riding a slow crop over the prostrate
  polo ball.



  MANGROVES

  How do you survive
  in the mangrove swamps--
  amid the twitchings of foetid water
  & lice thick as baby tears?

  How, with all the wallow of thick muck
  making suction noises and the teams in
  relays
  searching nightly with baited hounds,
  do you pull free?

  Your bamboo pole knows every ploy
  but a slender craft ill-equipped
  to sparring blows from every quarter
  the undergrowth necessitates.

  The closeness of the clammy night
  heaved about like so much rotting
  fruit will draw
  the ants ... devouring like that
  abundance of cold yellow eye--
  the firefly swarms that mock your
  heavy steel machete arm.

  Across the drift of darkness
  and the insect life
  you bat in swarms,
  the ultimate danger is not in the
  cayman giant
  or his reptilian cousin named of
  copper wire,
  the anaconda, or even mindless holes,
  thick black
  ooze that throttles a victim ... but
  two legged form coming,
  searching ... a spectre on hind quarters
  with a bolo knife stepping
  free of that beaded circle, the inner
  camp.



  The End





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