Christopher Phelps

Wonder has no opposite,
invisibly debossed,

this trace of a heavy hand
or heart; maybe
a zealous hand, maybe
a light heart, in a heat

lightning kind of way?
Wonder has no opposite,

Descartes might say, and did
in his list of the passions, six
primary flavors: love and hate,
joy and sadness,

wonder and desire.
Before any other, he wrote,

wonder occurs first.
Its virtue: curiosity,
the wish to know.
Its risk: astonishment,

the wish to be stunned
and not to know

the whole and fractal truth
of one’s own role in this.
In a coffee shop I found
a hotel pad in whose blank pages

I could just discern the etch
of these four plucky words.

Wonder has no opposite,
an unsigned signature
of someone’s feeling
they should write it down—

then leave the rest. Erased
and not, a palimpsest.