Someone is pulling at your fingers one by one, telling you to stand still, and you are meant to trust her. That small physical act of persuasion begins "Rediscovering Wonder" and drives everything after it. On the surface, a woman drags the speaker up through a pool into blinding sunlight, urges him to fly, and kisses him in mid-air. Underneath, the poem is about the difficulty of loosening your grip on yourself, and about what remains when you do. What remains is not a grand revelation but another person.
The structure rests on a refrain. "Tug" gets a line to itself again and again, like a drumbeat, and between the beats she gives orders: "Stand still. / Don't give. / Be strong. / Be…" The first time, the last command trails off unfinished and the speaker does the very thing he was told not to: "And I gave." Giving in is not defeat here. It is how the poem moves forward. The sequence returns almost word for word, but this time "Be…" is completed with a single word, "Free." The unfinished sentence is the hinge of the poem, and the second round resolves it with the line "And I flew."
The imagery is physical and a little dizzying. The rise "to the surface of the pool" and the "bursting through to the sky" feel like a birth or a baptism, a passage from one element to another. The sun is "so bright I thought I might die of it," so joy is described as a danger. That helps explain the poem's most striking gesture: "I closed my fist around my skull / Holding me in." The speaker tries to keep his own mind from coming apart, and the fist is a fear of overwhelm made literal. When he finally lets go, the poem splits him in two: "My body rising / Even as my mind fell away." The overthinking self drops and the body goes up.
The language starts to tangle as the world does. "Gravity had failed to fail / And failed to succeed" is deliberately unhelpful. The double negatives spin the sentence until the logic gives out, just as the speaker's sense of up and down does. "Somewhere / Between flying / And falling" sums up his state. The poem never decides which one is happening, and "I flew / As I fell" lets both be true.
There is no regular metre and almost no rhyme, so the few echoes stand out. The clearest is "rainbow insanity" against "brazen vanity," which links her quality to his. At first the madness is hers, but he reaches out, "Teasing the red of her lips from the rainbow," and "Claimed it as my own." The word "brazen" gives this moment a streak of humour. He steals a little of her wildness and is cheekily proud of it. The colours matter as well. The sprawling rainbow narrows to a single red, then to "how perfectly blue her eyes were." Wonder here is not only about vast skies. It lives in particular details.
Line length tracks his loosening. Early on the lines are clipped and bossy, with one-word commands and full stops that act like hands pressing down. Later they run on, breathless, through the long sentence that carries the kiss. Even there the poem pauses at "And" and then "I kissed her back," as if the speaker has to gather his nerve at the edge of the act.
The ending refuses to inflate itself. After all the whirling, flying and paradox, the closing lines are plain: "Just the fact of kissing her / Was all that mattered." The cosmic scale shrinks to a single fact, and that is the poem's central idea. The title says "Rediscovering," which implies wonder was once familiar and then lost, and her instruction to "Discover the sky" is really an invitation to look again. The name the poem appears under, search_for_infinity, suggests a reading: infinity is not out there at the end of the search but is found in one moment of attention.
The poem is worth reading because it doesn't explain its wonder. It enacts it through repetition, bodily detail and a sentence that loses its footing, and it keeps a sense of humour about its own giddiness. It also understands that giving way, which the speaker has been told not to do, is sometimes the only route to the sky.