Stillness, the poem insists in its first sentence, is a fiction. "There is no thing / as total stillness": the line break does something sly here. Split in two, "no thing" stops being the everyday "no such thing" and turns literal, so that nothing at all is ever completely at rest. The rest of the poem quietly demonstrates the claim.
It does so without arguing. The speaker offers a short run of observations, each a little subtler than the last. "Sound is movement" is the most abstract, since we usually set silence and noise against rest and motion, yet sound is vibration. "Then the wind" follows, and the small word "then" matters: it makes the list feel like something unfolding in time, one perception arriving after another. Next comes "there are clouds / behind the sunshine", which turns the familiar picture of sun behind cloud inside out. Judging by the image, bright light can hide what is drifting behind it, so a sky that looks fixed and cheerful is not.
Then the only person appears: "I sit in a corner / and count the pebbles." This is the poem's stillest scene, a figure tucked away with the most inert objects imaginable. Even so, counting is a kind of motion, a small progression of the mind from one stone to the next. The speaker is not an exception to the opening claim but an example of it. The "corner" suggests a place to watch from rather than to act in, and the poem's attention depends on that withdrawal.
The form carries the idea too. There is no rhyme and no punctuation at all, and apart from the opening "There" and the pronoun "I", no capital letters. Without a single full stop, nothing in the poem ever comes to a halt. Each line slides into the next, and the reader is never given a firm place to stand. The lines are very short, often only three to five syllables, so the rhythm is light and breath-sized. "Then the wind" has three syllables, about as long as a gust. The poem is built almost entirely of couplets, which gives it a steady, shallow pulse, like something breathing.
The ending is where this care pays off. "The shade under a tree / the leaves dance" gives us shade, the image of coolness and rest, and then immediately undercuts it. "Dance" is a joyful, visible verb. Yet the last word, alone on its line, takes it back: "imperceptibly". The leaves dance in a way too slight to be seen, which is the whole poem compressed into a paradox. The stanza break before that final word works like a held breath, because the reader waits a beat for the qualification. When it arrives it is the longest word in the poem, five syllables, but also the softest, trailing off rather than concluding. Because it modifies "dance" while standing cut off from it, the poem fades out of hearing instead of closing, which suits a text about things we can barely detect.
There is also a quiet movement of scale. The poem begins with an abstract statement, rises to the sky, drops to the ground among the pebbles, settles under a tree, and finally narrows to the leaves. Its attention zooms in, and at each step the motion it finds is smaller and harder to notice.
What makes the poem worth reading is its modesty. It does not announce a grand theme. It trains the reader to look more closely, and it values patience and the small sights that reward it. It feels close to haiku in its compression and its trust in small natural details, though it follows no fixed syllable pattern. Even the title, three asterisks in place of a name, seems to fit: the poem presents itself as a fragment, a moment caught while sitting in a corner. It leaves us with a gentle suspicion that the next time the world seems perfectly still, we simply haven't looked closely enough.