Brandon Roy

a psychodrama

 

 

SCENE I.

Ocean floor.

 

A deep sea DIVER makes slow progress toward a sea cave.  Blind fish swim past.  DIVER enters Cave.

 

 

SCENE II.

Sea cave.

 

DIVER swims toward entrance to a large shopping mall.  Carefully swims through revolving door.

 

 

SCENE III.

The moors of Scotland.

 

Enter PRZBILLA.

 

            PRZBILLA. [Sings.] A little clock indoors excitedly expires.

                        Memories still like the elderly settling in for bingo…

                                    The dog curls itself to the inmost.

                        Its nose retreats from the air.

                        A spider unfastens its string in the dark…

                                    A muffled television descends on a front yard,

                        and collaborative voices consider the bills.

                        A truck parks beneath a tree.

                        A plane zips West.

                        The sound of its jets falls off…

                                    I have forgotten someone I hate,

                        who is so much to be adhered to, perhaps

as near as noon, shy of the banalities of the arc.

Perhaps it is just as well.

 

 

SCENE IV.

A shopping mall.  Many persons milling, among them ROY.

 

DIVER removes mask.  Looks around in awe of the enormous mall, which contains an impressive rollercoaster.  DIVER waits in line for rollercoaster.  He is seated beside ROY.

 

            DIVER. Hey.

            ROY. Hey.

 

As rollercoaster climbs, Diver grows increasingly agitated.  At the summit DIVER tries to scream, but only bubbles come out.  ROY looks at him and, just before the rollercoaster plunges, shakes his head in disapproval.

 

 

SCENE V.

The moors of Scotland.

 

Enter FERNANDEZ.

 

            FERNANDEZ. [Sings.] The fountain spray is preceded by the fountain sound

                        Ice moves like a waiter

                        A woman’s face dies like a shrub

                        The time of the bird is daybreak, yes!

                        This room likens itself to being

                        A crack in the street mends the window

                        Suburbs wear at the voice of winter

                        Voices impoverish the future oh!

                        Judge not the angel at the bellows

                        Her chapped hands, her spitting out

                        A fellowship of blue-aproned fish

                        Her howling them under an old woman’s bonnet

                        The portrait precedes the pen

                        The reader the thought-white paper doll

                        Smelling of temporal ink, of Goethe, the bible

                        Tables the life, exacts the will

 

 

SCENE VI.

Ocean floor.

 

DIVER exits sea cave, descends into a ravine downstage.  His passage takes roughly ten minutes.

 

 

SCENE VII.

What appears to be a massive, submerged lost and found.  Purses, jackets, backpacks strewn about.

 

Enter DIVER, who sifts through the stuff.  Lingers over a pile of finely wrought gold rings.  Eventually locates own wallet and ascends.

 

 

SCENE VIII.

Middle School Classroom.

 

Enter WEBSTER wearing a tweed jacket and vest, and carrying a briefcase.  Walks to the front of the class, sets down briefcase and clears his throat.

 

            WEBSTER: ‘One is not bit twice by the same snake,’ said the philosopher Pythagoras.  But it is always the same people eating your sammy!  [Paces.] Always the same lateness in the clock, hit or miss.  All of you, you shooters of the broken isolation, I have named you after the Greek and Roman statues listed in the in-flight magazine.  [Points.] There is Aphrodite of Melos!  There is an Abstract Head!  Menelaus is a point guard!  When Apollo appears in the corner, I know a god is beside me!  Strange that Diana and Caesar are on the stunt team. [Pause.] But thou, old wanderer, who come in the disenchanted evening to take away the dying hotdogs as I am firing up the Hummer, thou whom I sort of know, thou ordinarily halfway-housed peripatetic, I have given you a derided and ignominious name; I have named thee Nero.

 

 

SCENE IX. INTERLUDE.

The moors of Scotland.  ROY with a Spanish guitar, seated in a straight-back chair, plays THEME MUSIC, first right-handed, then switches to the left.

 

 

SCENE X.

ROY’s recreation room.  Pool table center stage.

 

Enter RANDOLPH, who walks in flip-flops to the pool table.

 

            RANDOLPH: [Pointing out the details of the carvings decorating the sides of ROY’s pool table.] Here is a levee great and strong, restraining a varnished river.  Beyond the river is a cloud that from one angle looks like a room full of children eating lunch off plastic trays, from another like four flamingos surrounding a caterpillar, their heads near to the ground, from another like a man in fatigues aiming a paintball rifle in such a way as to suggest he is taking the game too seriously, and from another like a woman feeding a black bear a bunch of grapes.  Here are two stadiums busy with people’s chatter.  In one, a teen pop idol escorted by floods and spots from all conceivable angles waves to seas of girls in t-shirts and ties.  Loud rise the PA speakers while the idol stands by her microphone.  Meanwhile the audience has encircled a disagreement—two moms are wrangling over the blood money for a basket of nachos upset in the rush.  People take sides, each backing the side that she has chosen, while the ushers keep them back and suggest the parents take their dispute elsewhere.  Outside the other stadium people are encamped waiting for playoff tickets to go on sale.  There a game of nerf football proceeds in which the team with a commitment to defense is winning.  Here is an empty lot, spacious and paved.  Contractors are discussing blueprints while the workers drink big gulps.  One worker has a tattoo on his bicep very curious to behold.  It depicts a room full of women operating sewing machines, and when the worker flexes it appears that the needles move and the cloth is guided underneath.  Here is a pen filled with cattle, brown, brindled and black.  As they are led down the chute, two men watch from above, talking sports.  Beside this is a bottling plant made of bricks and decorated with red neon letters rising from the roof: OCEANUS.  Here also is a greenhouse, and inside Christmas Poinsettia are arrayed in rows beneath grow lights.  This whole panel is devoted to tract homes and the occasional strip mall, with cars passing here and there, and carven telephone poles protruding above.  People are gathered outside of a particular Villa-style home to welcome a newborn and his mother returning from the hospital.  In the back yard they are barbequing and playing Dead Prez on a boom-box.  All along the edges of the pool table are carved explosions, the four thick legs of the table extending up into chiseled mushroom clouds.  The pool cues are shaped like missiles, and the overhead light is a replica of the moon, illuminated from within.  [RANDOLPH chalks a pool cue and begins a leisurely game.]

 

 

SCENE XI.

Ocean floor.  DIVER swims through a kelp forest.  Discovers a Christmas tree ornament attached to a kelp frond.  Pauses to examine ornament.  DIVER continues swimming, ornament in hand.

 

 

SCENE XII.

Enlarged version of ornament lies center stage, the words “Know Tenderness” printed in white flocked letters on its metallic face.  ALDRIDGE walks around and around the ornament looking up at the letters.  Lights fade.

 

 

SCENE XIII.

The moors of Scotland.

 

Ender BLAKE.

 

            BLAKE. [Sings.] The reach of the prince is the purpose of the father

                        My attentions mistress echoes

                        Which raven drinks

                        Offers his observations of the guards

                        A seal glories in servitude

                        The prince knows wrong

 

 

SCENE XIV.

A shopping mall.  BAYLESS and ODEN are seated in the food court sipping Orange Juliuses.

 

            BAYLESS. In the end, you are weary of this past season. [Sip.]

            ODEN. This morning among houses the dogs bark Rose Garden, you investment! [Sip.]

            BAYLESS. Tired of living in Celtic antiquity, and Laker. [Sip.]

            ODEN. Here even the lightrail looks retro. [Sip.]

            BAYLESS. Modesty alone has remained young; modesty has remained as simple as a parking lot. [Sip.] The most contemporary American is William C. Ralston. [Sip.]

            ODEN. This morning I saw a busy street whose name is Caesar Chaves, a broad and simmering meal for the sun, where from Sunday evening to Sunday evening, six times daily, investors, workers, and lovely paralegals go their way…[Sip.]

 

 

SCENE XV.

The moors of Scotland.

 

Enter OUTLAW.

 

            OUTLAW. [Gestures grandly to the audience.  Sings.]

All of this totalizing annoys me

                        It’s either an instant or an eternity, Sydney or the bush

                        Everything is gone or redeemed

                        The wide sky is a neutron o’erscattered with camels

                        Their saddle bags filled with dancing demons

Or angels or Jordans

                        Poor Dirk made a friend, and now the dancing lights

                        Cast long shadows

                        Looking ahead, we have

                        An outing to the zoo: see the caged Blake Griffin

                        And the women laugh

                        According to Bill Walton, they are either laughing

                        With us or at us            I believe

                        They have their own jokes

                        And yet we share certain aspirations

 

 

SCENE XVI.

The shore.  DIVER surfaces, runs in flippers through the waves and up the beach directly toward audience.  At the last moment he falls into the orchestra pit.  He is followed by each member of the cast in turn, in uniform, surfacing and running with a basketball.  ROY is last to fall into pit.

 

 

END.

7.

Traverse the bay.  It is just home to them

that spent too long admiring the wreck; and did

you know the sand was once alive and swimming?

Not now.  We shall in economic crisis

wear red and black and enjoy ourselves regardless

of the journalistic facts.  Though each of us

a narrow band of mourning wears, let us greet

with rivers of blood and comely looks the playoffs.

I am distracted, in an airport.  It's so late

they vacuum round me.  The music is orange and

inescapable--ditto the TSA announcements--

but friends! when the sun's chariot rises and burns

like a cliche on Des Moines' lips I will fly home.

Do we know how little we know about tomorrow?

6.

 

The lamps of Lake Oswego.  Good for them

for having cast the entertainment centers

of Lake Oswego in domestic light--

yet sometimes family entertainment is

darkness still.  Khryapa plays muscovite ball.

Rasheed, I'm told, is aging; one looks in the mirror

and one's face is what it is, so says he.

Where is Bonzi?  Does Ruben still go to church?

While lamps in Lake Oswego turn the very

dust to souls and on the face of the

beloved cast the squirreliest of beams

we learn exactly what we knew before:

strange as it is to see leaping dolphins

traverse the bay, it is just home for them.

 

5.

Anything.  I had a great time.  Ditto,

and my life polite as a colleague passed.

I disbelieved injuries, but injuries remained.

As a columnist’s eye sees the heart of a player

I never got past the ribs.  Poor me, to have

love as a series of isos come.  Who called

them for me must have seen the hidden

mismatch.  A system prompts its own disorder.

Others live like Darius Milhaud’s fingers

or Darius Miles’s rhetoric or the pistons

of his Rolls Royce or the sound of milk

poured over his breakfast cereal or

a stray dog among Tigard Tigers or

the lamps of Lake Oswego.  Good for them.

4.

Our understanding, the clock keeps running or stops,

that friends you’ve come to talk basketball—

I digress for the sake of those players

who tire of your reasonable scrutiny.

The sonnet wears an asbestos apron.

It can take the heat.  Apollo gave

too much laurel because he liked my looks.

Where left am I?  The wrong side of the urn.

But recall the words of Martell Webster, still

bound by heavy footwear: We don’t deserve it,

but I make sure that I play hard and have

no regrets.  Basketball doesn’t last

forever.  The stress fracture in my foot

is just one of those things.  I don’t regret

anything.  I had a great time. Ditto.  

 

3.

Knowledge, I encourage you all to chuck it

since after all in the air it is better served.

Just as the ball endures the net’s caress

uncomprehendingly, and the sneaker to the floor

is a living hieroglyph, and the pompom

accomplishes nothing alone, and twelve minutes

is anywhere from twenty to an hour,

I too have no idea what I’m saying.

But now the moon steps sadly, abstractedly

up to wherefrom it’s watched a few seasons,

and nothing lovely escapes its seeming indifference.

The timekeeper’s light touch, the indignation

of the official.  Asleep or awake, beyond

our understanding, the clock keeps running or stops.

 

2.

But the very possibilities

relax when we’re taking it one game

at a time—the way the sun sets

and rises like a billion times a day

being a jump-shooting team.  Those who would

flag a sonnet for its indirectness,

or whatever, relent.  Even the stretch is long

and permissive of countless questions of comportment.

Yet how long must we wear the boot of direct address?

Is not a jump-shot a kind of speculation?

A blog is never taxed by pluralism

just as the rim is never bent from distance.

If each game is a dream in the sway of unconscious

knowledge, I encourage you all to chuck it.

1.

Do we know how little we know about tomorrow

which happens to be February nineteenth,

the last day to trade in the NBA?

That knowledge is a problem like the view

from the foot of one of several volcanoes.

At home one can always wonder what

about is not home.  The volcanoes always think

through vents or altogether beneath detection.

There is also a major employer from the middle

ages still reclining in her office,

smiling as though a private joke has flown

through the incredible view; even her

credulity is strained not at the rumors

but the very possibilities.

 

I've had an intuition that Sergio will be with the team for a long time--even though there are many sound arguments for trading him. 

Since he's seen more minutes the past couple of nights, and so far as I know he wasn't traded today, I thought now might be a good time to post a fragment of a poem I've been writing on the subject.

 

 

Homage to Mister Rodriguez

    [1]
The Sergeant your coach yelled so long
moved you not, restless, waiting for whom? Still,
you are a patient man.—
I seem to see you pass here still:
Fernandez, Batum, in moments odd you dished
before a firecat, bright eyes on the halftime
entertainment, all the children still.
‘Fernandez ...’ Fernandez will look while you read a t-shirt.

    [2]
Outside the Northwest winters in grim dark
grey air lashing high thro’ the virgin condos
raccoons in windows crawl,
surely the Spanish heart repels, nonplussed.
I doubt if Fernandez than this cast, that sky,
spares from his discourse on you’re a/t ratio
more. We are on each other’s teams
who care. Both of our worlds drafted us. Stand lush,

    [3]
thy eyes look to me harsh. Out of tamales & air
your game’s made, and moves. I summarize, see,
from the youtubes it.
I think you will stay. Why do we
linger, diminished, in our friends’ air,
implicitly visible, to whom, a season,
seasons, over off-seasons; or not;
to a big prospect; or not; shimmer & materialize.

    [4]
Jaw-dropt, rise with its rationale, mending then;
then not. When the zone collapses, who misses it?
Your coach never quieted,
Fernandez ah two seasons past you—
svelte & eastward staring on a smooth deck
it seems I describe you, mature. I leave to check,
I leave to stay online,
and the Sergeant, & Monty, & Fernandez, & the huddled men.

    [5]
By the week we embarked we were, most, warmed up.
Strange teams across us, after a fortnight’s practice
fortuitous, endeared us;
skin-prickly warm, dry, peckish; so were well
many as one month we could have all time-outs;
screens, quelled; a firstborn child kennelled; water
crowding & falling: unwaiting.
And the season itself he leapt acourt young Brandon Roy

    [6]
(delivered from the clouds; because he lost
off their hotel rooms, round-eyed, a multivalent gunboat
across a mountain river,
that water clouded dark & briny
& broad, all of the other men could fly
and the factory’s tertiary investment up to him,
sloughed off on a bad day
soft on the ignoble feasting of thanksgiving) breathing…

    [52]
They say thro’ the fading fall Prizbylla thrives,
your second, who than you bore more rebounds;
and I describe him unburied. I move on.
Seaborn…

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Since our co-laureat T Darkstar has taken the season-as-epic into his capable hands, I wanted to offer this as a complementary piece to his next installment: a pre-game poem.  Enjoy...?

 

 

 

 

Waiting for the Spurs

 

 

--What are we doing, gathered in this sports bar in the mall?

 

            The spurs are arriving today.

 

--Why is nothing happening in the library?

   Why do the adjuncts sit making no discussion questions?

 

            Because the spurs are arriving today.

            What is there for the adjuncts to discuss now?

            When the spurs come, they will dictate the level of discourse.

 

--Why did our mayor wake up with the clouds

   and in his office sit in state

   in his swivel chair, wearing a silver tie pin.

 

            Because the spurs are arriving today,

            and the mayor is waiting for a conference call

            with Gregg Popovich.  In fact,

he prepared a lullaby in which

he wrote in many euphemisms and epithets.

 

--Why did our street cleaners

   come out this morning in their crimson embroidered togas;

   why did they don a slow-moving truck

   resplendent with amethysts and emeralds of reclaimed water;

   why do they point beautifully wrought hoses

   at our sidewalks and gutters?

 

            Because the spurs are arriving today,

            and such things dazzle Bruce Bowen.

 

--Why don’t the worthy urchins come as usual

   to bum cigarettes around the square?

 

            Because the spurs are arriving today

            and they do not smoke.

 

--Why should this angst and bravado

   erupt from us. (How sanctimonious our faces have become.)

   Why has the downtown emptied so quickly

   into the pensive, delicate suburbs.

 

            Because day has ended and the spurs are thought to have arrived.

            Though some people came in from the video poker room

            and they say the spurs no longer exist.

 

--Now what will we do without the spurs?

   Those guys were some kind of problem.

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