The Uninvited

By Glyn Maxwell b. 1962 Glyn Maxwell

We did not care muchly who, in the murder,

we turned out to be, providing whoever

used to inhabit the white chalk figure

frozenly pawing the blood-stained sofa

was not one of us but a different dier.

Dazzled colonel, distracted lover,

meddling couple of the library whisper,

cook unpoisoned or ponderous super,

sleuth, inheritor, innocent, actual

killer detected or undetected—it

didn’t matter, but not that ended

individual manning the hour

he died in, as we would all one dies

man one hour, one mo, one jiffy.

Let us be Anyone other than Body!

But then we’d go on with the game all summer:

the three allowed queries on the hot verandah,

the fib in the gazebo, the starlit rumour,

the twitching curtain and the dim unhelpful

gardener’s boy: it would all be explicable

soon in the lounge, and we didn’t mind waiting.

No, what we minded was the hairless stranger

who wasn’t invited and wouldn’t answer

and had no secrets or skeletons either

and got up later than us, then later

than even the bodies, and never turned in,

or blamed or suspected or guessed the outcome

but always was exiting, vanishing, going,

seen on the lawn—then there were more of them

massing, unarmed, parting when followed,

combing the country but not for a weapon

or corpse or clue, then halting and singing

unknown thunderous hymns to a leader

new on us all at our country party he’d

caught in the act of an act of murder.

Source: The Boys at Twilight: Poems 1990-1995 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2000)

Biography

Born in England to Welsh parents, Glyn Maxwell was educated at Oxford University and Boston University, where he studied both poetry and theater with Derek Walcott. This simultaneous training in two disciplines has enabled him to create innovative work across genres. Maxwell has written numerous verse plays as well as long narrative poems. The Sugar Mile (2005), a verse narrative set in a Manhattan bar a few days before . . .

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