Out in a New York winter, the speaker of "Star of Wonder" sets off like a modern pilgrim and ends up asking an engineer's question. The title echoes the carol "We Three Kings" ("star of wonder, star of night"), and the poem borrows the Nativity story too: a lone traveller, a bright light overhead, an inn, a manger, the promise of wisdom. Dominique Cyprès walks that story down Madison Avenue to see what survives. The glow, the walking and the wondering do. A clear meaning does not.
The first stanza has no capitals and no punctuation, so it reads as one long breath, pushed along by the wind. It opens on a dangling participle, "fighting a strong gust," and the speaker doesn't say "i" until the fourth line. Even then the vision is unreliable, because the speaker is "peering through / the frost on my glasses." No wonder the thing seen is an "orb" "hovering," words that sound half-supernatural. The verb that follows is "wander," not "walk." It sits one vowel away from "wonder," as if drifting and marvelling were the same motion. Meanwhile the taxis go "careening wildly into the night," and the city's speed makes the lone walker look slow and a little foolish.
The second stanza holds the poem's only clear rhyme, "night" and "light," and it sounds like the carol: "a star a star" has the breathless cheer of a hymn. The rhyme is the setup for the letdown. The star "brings no wisdom / and only the coldest light." The cold has soaked into the light itself, which is a nice contradiction, since light is supposed to warm. Then comes the poem's best joke. The star leads "to no inn i can afford." The Bethlehem problem was that there was no room, but here the problem is the price. The speaker "know[s] better than to seek / a manger in central park," and that phrase, "know better," admits a loss of innocence. The tone throughout is dry and deadpan.
The third stanza begins with the bureaucratic "on closer inspection," and the spell breaks. The line breaks delay the reveal: "the star is a great / lighted crystal snowflake / suspended on cables." "Crystal" is still pretty, but "suspended on cables" is hardware. A snowflake is delicate and unrepeatable, and here it has been made huge, rigid and propped up by machinery. The poem never says whether this is a Christmas display, but the title and the snowflake suggest one, and that is an inference rather than a stated fact.
The final stanza turns on a single word. "how many tons / i wonder" is idle, practical curiosity, a long way from awe, yet it is the title's word again. Wonder has changed from a noun to a verb, from something that happens to you into something you do. The repeated question echoes "a star a star," so the carol's exclamation gives way to a refrain of calculation. This is also where the poem finally raises its voice: "the screaming howling cold" is the loudest phrase in a poem that has been quietly understated. Many of its verbs end in *-ing* (fighting, peering, hovering, seeping, careening, turning), which keeps everything in present-tense motion. The speaker never arrives anywhere, only turns a collar up and keeps wondering.
The poem is significant because it is neither a sneer nor a sermon. It could have mocked the fake star, and it could have wept for lost faith. Instead its speaker still walks toward the light, still looks hard at it, and still cannot stop asking about it. Asking "how many tons" can be read as a modern, secular form of amazement, since we often measure what astonishes us. By keeping the Nativity's shape and swapping its contents for taxis, rent and steel cable, the poem suggests that wonder can survive in a city where it has to be weighed rather than worshipped.