“W, a poem”

for Georges Perec 

It is to ask the painter of a watercolour hue:
‘why owe you twice what a sheep is or a tree,
if the fee you double has to hew you a puzzle?’

An enigma, like a game in E, its jigsaw zigzag
never fits the excess void left behind by X,
the exit on the way from ‘why’ to what is said.

If you glean an anagram from each angle, do you
dabble with your double view of what you hate:
a swastika that awaits your Olympiad of riddles?

Is this letter a residuum of what troubles you?
If you slice it down the middle, does it not
hereafter indicate a twofold victory over life?

If it maps the rise and fall of fortune, like a yo-yo,
why oh, why oh, must you find four palm trees
in a park, if not to make of them your symbol?

It is the name for an X whose V does not view
the surface of a lake but the mirror on a wall,
where U and you become a tautonym, a continuum.

 

“W” is from Eunoia by Christian Bök republished on Design Observer through kind permission of the author and Coach House Press.