I like the poem - dare I say "elliptical";an accurate sense of targetry - I guess that equals "on trarget by implication." Well, never entirely dress the ghost.
"Tones of war" - given present evidence - sounds too pretty. "Tons of war" is heavy handed, but that's where my ear/eye went.
Stephen Vincent

I liked the poem, and even wondered, "Hmm, did Brian really write those two others prior to this one, and then plop them in?" I liked thinking that you had done that, thinking of poems as spaces large enough to include anything, even other poems. Gerald Burns did this a lot, actually--the example I can think of right off the top of my head is a long poem generally on the subject of "narrative"--that I *think* is included in Longer Poems. Also in a long poem on "investigation," although that one is still unpublished. Anyway, thanks for the poem!

The poem actually recounts its writing quite truthfully - the super of my building (we don't actually have a "super" but the guy that does repair work, Eliot) was installing a new door in my apartment.

I was trying to write and went with the flow of distractions.

The line about not having written any poetry that year is not entirely accurate, but it sure felt like a wasted year, so when I came up short for anywhere to go with the poem I just dropped in some things that I found in the pages of typed notes I keep in a folder.

One line -- "Impersonating an Officer" -- is taken from Ashbery's Vermont Notebooks.

Hey, thanks for the behind-the-scenes report on the making of the poem--and for letting me know the two earlier poems were indeed earlier and not part of a fictive construct (which seemed, for some reason, not like something you'd have done anyway--but I wasn't sure). "Fictive construct"? Fictional construct? Err. Whatever, you know what I mean. Anyway, thanks!