Sunday’s paper brought news of one of the first Olympic gold wins in Sochi for the Americans, a victory for snowboarder Sage Kotsenburg. After a self-proclaimed “megadrought” of wins for the 20 year-old, he “kept it weird,” and impressed the judges. Afterwards, he told the New York Times, “Coming here and winning, I can’t even describe the feeling.”
Kotsenburg does more for snowboarding than poetry, but he joins a vast league of athletes who often fail to capture in language the inner feelings of ecstatic moments. Years ago, I had a high school teammate who made local news for his national rankings in long-distance running. Suddenly, after each of his races, reporters wanted to know how he felt. He joked that he would string together beads of clichés drawn from the sports pages to feed the beast.
My partner suggested to me that perhaps what the Olympics needs is a pack of poets to write press speeches for these jubilant moments. I imagined Kotsenburg telling the times that his heart “was dancing with the daffodils” in true Wordsworthian style.
But explaining ecstatic experiences is challenging for poets too. Mary Ruefle once wrote about her experience as a young woman hopping a logging train winding its way through a starry Oregon night. As she works to communicate what it felt to look up and see the beauty of the universe overhead, she succumbs to the same kind of articulateness we see in athletes.
“There are so many and they are / so white!” she blurts out, while admitting, “all / I can say is I am happyhappyhappy….”
What ultimately makes Ruefle’s poem “Timberland” successful is her startlingly honest admission that words often fail to fully portray what it feels to live through a peak experience. She pairs that experience with another equally unique moment: eating a lychee while standing on the banks of the Pearl River in China. There’s nothing particularly wonderful about the setting or the “sour” man who sells her the fruit, so why is it special?
So that we understand the importance of her moment in China, she takes us back to the logging train, when daring was an escape from one mundane existence that would take her to other bland days. Yet, for one moment, I sit with her in the boxcar where “two tons of timberland” presses against the back of our heads, the train “hurtling across the continent with unbelievable speed.” Death feels omnipresent. That same night, another train derailment leaves friends thinking she is already dead. But the train continues its “circuitous / silhouette against the great Blue Mountains” and the stars overhead thrill. My memories fill the void.
And that lychee? Ruefle closes the poem with it: “it’s like swallowing a pearl.”
