"Chief Warden Atop a Piano," Glyn Maxwell

I should like to take this opportunity
everyone to wish you all good morning.
Good morning.

I am informed by bicycle the transport
is scheduled to depart the transport depot
at eleven hundred hours, that's

eleven hundred hours, which is to say
this very morning. Please. Thank you.
A Monday, not a Sunday,

a Monday morning service of thanksgiving
will take place in the corridor between
classrooms seven and nine

in the peacetime designation. (This is unstable.)
At nine. Nine hundred hours. (I haven't marked it,
I was extremely careful.)

Further announcements will be made--beg pardon?
A question from the floor... Well as it happens
I can, son, yes I can.

Young gentleman's inquiring as to whether
I myself do play the pianoforte
(if I might just climb down)

to which the answer is as it happens I do.
Well now we have some hush. I expect you know
this little one about bluebirds?

From The Sugar Mile.

Glyn Maxwell is the poetry editor at The New Republic, which is--as it happens--where Adam Kirsch reviewed an earlier Maxwell book, The Breakage, back in 1999.. This is his eighth collection of poems, and encompasses a long-form narrative in which the poet meets an Englishman in a Manhattan bar on September 8, 2001, and is drawn into the man's recounting of his life during the London blitz of 1940. Other poems from the collection include "Sally playing Patience" and "Robby stretching his legs," first published in The New Criterion.