I'm back. Also, older. Also, old bodies.

Figures of beauty and of the grotesque war for my attention and divide me. For a month I tried (not very hard) to write something about Germany. But I have so little to say of my own on Western Europe. Everything comes out sounding like another person’s experience, one of those insufferable study abroad returnees who corners you at parties to lecture on Viennese architecture, or tries to teach you the polka. Nothing shocked me, no screaming mouths of old women, sunken and full of gold teeth; no dogs raping each other. I was happy. But other people’s happiness is not interesting.

Remembering that happiness, too, I become irritated that it has passed. Walking the narrow streets, watching the beautiful people at cafes, I could lucidly see myself living in these cities, a real person’s life – like the feeling when I was younger, being abroad for the first time. There was a marvelous newness to the world, and untested pleasures. There would be an initiation, a crossing over the threshold of life, and from then on, I would be a part of something.

If now my voice can take on a smug cynicism, throughout this blog, it may be because I will be 24 on Tuesday, and sometimes the days at school (even after only one week!) are very long and very lonely. Yet I still have very high expectations for the world, and for the place I will assume in it.

And Ukraine still provides its own picaresque of absurdities for my interest. A few weeks ago I went to the Black Sea. There are many old bodies along the water. One was pink and white as a baby, in large sunglasses and hat; like a baby, no elbows or knees, merely stacked flesh folds. Her small black bikini pinched the folds and made her even more pink and white. Another was scrawnier, but her stomach obscenely bloated, scalded red. She sat with her legs spread out around it and placed a towel on top, fanning the stomach.

Old men in lawn chairs looked at the young girls bathing with heavy, red-lidded looks. What desires, I wonder, still rattle around warped frames? How helpless they must be to their now-obscene lusts. I don’t mean this in a judgmental way. We are all prisoners inside our bodies. This interests me. I wonder if I will desire young bodies when I am very old, and if this feeling will horrify me.

I remember one on a train, with his water-warped notebooks, all shoved in a bag. He flipped through them, numbers and names, lists, scribbled crossed-out notes. The handwriting was like a child’s. He jabbered at Valentina as we rode home. His mouth was purple and trembled. He showed her a photograph (himself?): a young man in uniform, with the clear gaze of young men who have put on a uniform for the first time.

Poems I have written for them, these old men whose tatty coats flap from their backs as they bicycle, jaws set on cigarettes. Shoulders set, as if out of spite, bonily. How like greasy old crows, I thought. My poems were full of crows, black wings on the snow. I don’t like the words now. They were cold and small and self-satisfied. I haven’t written a poem in months. I feel very unright about how I write them, and would like to wax long and excessive now.

But only so much of the grotesque or grit is tolerable. When it exhausts me, I need to feel that the world is ordered into pure forms of beauty. I read some uncollected Anthony Hecht poems in the new issue of Poetry; as always, he hammers chaos into a pleasing shape. I look at some paintings. Rebecca Zorach’s book on the French Renaissance, Blood, Milk, Ink, Gold, arrived in the mail. On the cover is Diana attended by nymphs, half-shielded by crimson robes, and leering satyrs. Her skin looks lamped from the inside. Actaeon watches from the far left, still unseen; to the right, indicating his fatal metamorphosis, a stag writhes in agony, set upon by golden hounds. It is perfect.

I listen to Thomas Tallis. The polyphonics spiral and expand like throats, like the ceiling of the cathedral in Cologne. A large reliquary sits below the apse like gold flame. I thought of it again today in the forest – the trees as pillars, drawing the eye down to a small whorl of light where a clearing is. The air is different, in cathedrals and forests, clearer. It made me feel holy and ancient, as if I were a broken monument, white marble scattered across anonymous sands.

Such a feeling, though, is too abstract; again, too small and cold. I do not want to be rubble. Above all, I want a more human writing. More than any sweeping gestures toward perfection, there may be more of eternity in prosaic, awkward-shaped realities.