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Hello Norm,
I'm having problems decoding this one. Antecedent is the thing that comes before others in an a sequence. Grammatically speaking, in this poem, "them" normally would refer to "time" and "history" but I feel like the ambiguity of the ending, the turn which pans out away from the "he" to a wider abstraction with the "he" still implied, is referring to people of which the ellipsis is suggesting a conflation between those two.
Survivor also comes earlier pushing the notion of people--which pushes the notion of conflation.
If I cheat and use my knowledge of Norm's previous work, then I return to the notion of legacy to insert that into "hope."
All this said, the idea of what the "he" wants is never stated, but the poem seems to be concerned with the feeling of not obtaining whatever it is. "[I]n spirit" suggests (and I am reading in heavily here) that the "he" feels incorporeal, ghost-like in the state of unobtain-ment (?) a kind of imprisonment or internment.
If I cheat further, and scroll down to your response to nas, I think about the Holocaust. And since I can't shake that overlay, I'm going with it. Now, the "he" is undergoing an internment, looking up at the moon in a way in which those in the camps might have done so, whilst the "he" is reflecting upon the treatment of history and temporal distance from those events in WWII in "his" current time.
If by some miracle this ramble hit upon the thrust of the poem, I admire the title for its multiplicity in meaning, yet I couldn't unlock the poem without knowing the poet. If I haven't unlocked the poem, I readily admit I'm at loss. Knowing Norm, tells me that both personal legacy and cultural legacy is entwined in this piece and should be read together and a key that normally would be given to move in one direction or the other, steers the reader away from the one that a key is not provided for.
Close?
Namaste,
~Tim
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Antecedent CA Run 5 of 15 - 2015 (Read 197 times)
