Four lines, one verb, and a feeling most people know well: the restless curiosity about someone who isn't there. "Wonder" is a poem about distance, and it shows that distance almost entirely through repetition. Nothing happens in it. No one speaks to the beloved, no answer comes, and no scene is described. The speaker only turns the same thought over until it doubles back on itself.
Nothing reliable is known to me about who wrote the poem or when, so the evidence here is the page itself. That is enough, because the poem is built tightly.
The word "wonder" carries almost everything. It appears in the title and then six more times in the body, as "wonder" once and "wondering" five times, in every line but the third. The poem opens with a finite verb, "I wonder what your doing right now", which gives us a speaker and a moment. After that the verb loosens into the participle "Wondering," and the next three lines all begin with it. A participle with no subject is a thought that never quite begins or ends, and the grammar mimics a mind drifting. The speaker stops being someone who wonders and becomes someone simply in a state of wondering. The title also plays on the word's two meanings. "Wonder" can be idle curiosity, but it can also be awe, and the poem lets both meanings sit together.
The questions grow smaller and more intimate as the poem goes on. First comes the wide "what your doing right now," a question about a whole life in a single moment. Then it narrows to "what color is your shirt," a detail so small it is almost comically specific. Then it narrows again to "how it smells." The shirt becomes a stand-in for the person, and the sense of smell, the one most tied to memory and closeness, is the one the speaker reaches for. The ellipsis after "smells..." lets the line trail off, as if the speaker is embarrassed by their own tenderness or lost in it.
Then the last line turns inward: "Wondering if your wondering about the things I wonder of you..." The speaker is no longer imagining the other person's shirt. They are imagining the other person imagining them. The pronouns cross like mirrors, "your" and "I" and "you," and the line reads like a loop that could repeat forever. The poem also ends on another ellipsis instead of a full stop, so the thought is left open and unanswered, which suits a poem about not knowing.
The rhythm supports this. There is no rhyme, and the lines are not regular, but their lengths are telling. The first line is close to a steady eight-syllable beat, and the second runs a little longer. The third drops to about six syllables, a short, hushed line. The fourth then stretches to around seventeen, spilling over like a thought that keeps growing as it is spoken. A reader has to rush to get through it, much as an anxious mind speeds up when it circles a question.
The spelling and diction add to the effect. "Your" appears twice where "you're" would be standard, and the phrasing "wonder of you" is looser than "wonder about you." Those choices are open to interpretation, but the poem reads like a message typed quickly and not revised, which gives it the sound of real, unguarded feeling. A more polished version might have been more correct, but it would also have felt more rehearsed.
As for its significance, "Wonder" is a small poem and does not pretend otherwise. What it does well is capture a particular emotional experience: the way longing shifts from "what are you doing?" to "do you think of me the way I think of you?" That shift, from curiosity about another person to uncertainty about your place in their mind, is the heart of the poem. By making the form loop the way the thought does, with the same word returning and the last line turning back on the first, the poem lets the reader feel that uncertainty and not just hear it described. That quiet match between structure and feeling is what makes it worth reading closely.