Ultraviolet

Cold water breaks over.

Blue light shifted

Out of sight
Until only echoed brightness
In our eyes
Saturated everything.

Dance-black
In a memory from
Time immemorial
From misplaced youth
Where dreams are now
Remembered.

Lint-flecks like sudden stars
Pricked the dimness
While thunder rocked and rolled.
The detergent glare of whites,
Shirts and skirts,
Were shrouds of ghosts, shimmering.

It’s now an old room
Tawdry in the daylight
Maybe pulled to rubble
As the years sucked it down;
A dance-hall before the names
For dancing became exotic,
Before the newness wore off
And continued newness
Rubbed it dull.

Blue light
Spectral, like things to come,
Immediate and invisible
Only converted by a trick
For our eyes to believe.

Dancers spin and wave,
Embarrassed gestures
Swivelling hips and bodies
Darkness with little detail.

So the past
Catches up, or rather
Stills the image
Drains it of hope
Arrests aspiration
For the unformed and unimaginable
Thing it was.

The faces are gone.
Persons, personalities,
Several together, anchored, reaching
Through the altered light
And the jive-music,
The sound of what
Appeared to be now.

Darkened memory
Picks it out of nowhere
Nowhere special.
Shapes a moment of time
Once an instant with a pulse
Now a corpsed and laughable
Fragment.

This old memory
This worn head
Full of such fragments
Whips them up
And tries to make them breathe
But life is extinct
Just as all remembered things
Are hazy.

The blue light Once so vivid Obscured it all: Who was dancing Whose hands reached out. No-one knew.

Only the lint is shining.

Initialising