Someone is stuck in the aftermath of something that never properly ended. The speaker argues that without closure, it's hard to see ugliness at all, because whatever went unresolved keeps a strange kind of beauty. The wound image carries most of this idea: red, weeping, bleeding, and never healing. Even the eyes are called wounds, which suggests that crying and looking back are part of the same ongoing hurt.
The speaker then turns to nostalgia, calling it honest but tragic. Longing isn't history, since history is finished and longing isn't. It's a dream built from needs that went unmet. The last stanza picks yellow as the worst emotional color, the tint of aged photographs and newspapers, the shade that fades memories. The mood is wistful and quietly aching. The speaker seems to find the pain lovely and also to resent it, as if loss is both a comfort and a slow erasure.