Bruhat intervals as rooks on skew Ferrers boards

We characterise the permutations π such that the elements in the closed lower Bruhat interval [id, π] of the symmetric group correspond to nontaking rook configurations on a skew Ferrers board. It turns out that these are exactly the permutations π such that [id, π] corresponds to a flag manifold defined by inclusions, studied by Gasharov and Reiner. Our characterisation connects the Poincaré polynomials (rank-generating function) of Bruhat intervals with q-rook polynomials, and we are able to compute the Poincaré polynomial of some particularly interesting intervals in the finite Weyl groups An and Bn. The expressions involve q-Stirling numbers of the second kind. As a by-product of our method, we present a new Stirling number identity connected to both Bruhat intervals and the poly-Bernoulli numbers defined by Kaneko.