All Potential’s Secretly Kinetic and All Phenomena Seethe

If you switch off enough machines—
That’s if you can, if you still can,
Without some heroic effort

To tramp into some lonely place
And sulk about fellow trampers
Who keep turning up to disrupt

Your hard-earned, ever-loving peace—
Suddenly you will notice sounds
You had forgotten existed.

So big deal. Listen to the rain
On metal waste receptacles
And consider all the transfers

That make things happen as they will.
It’s no small thing that energy
Can fly between things without them

Much rearranging, much changing
Their general geometry.
The storm transfers its energy

And utterly falls to pieces,
But the obdurate metal bins
Stand silently in the downpour,

Ready for more trash to go in,
To be dumped out of them, the storm
In impotent self-destruction

Hardly transforming such sturdy
Peasants of small infrastructure,
Stiller than donkeys in the rain.

But they’re not silent, not really.
You just have to listen to them.
Every piece of scrap is brooding.