After Many Light Years Photons Briefly Dance

Do you learn anything
Useful for life through art
That you or others made?

Probably not. If so,
What you learn, you’ll forget.
Look at those artists’ lives!

What are you learning, then,
About yourself, about
Anything, making things?

How to make more things. How
To make things you like more.
You may learn you can’t save

Yourself through self-knowledge.
You may arrange a truce
With a demanding world.

If a propagating
Electromagnetic
Or gravity wave went

Along, bumping into,
Illuminating, or
Compressing noduled things,

What would be in it for
The photons, for instance?
Here we are on a porch

That isn’t ours, glowing
Along with late summer
Green shadows, a blue roof

Showing across a lawn,
And all our friends are here,
Sound waves rolling on air,

The crows and a chainsaw
Over somewhere, country
Music redigitized

From radio waves blocks
From here, a microwave
Oven beeping again

From an open window,
Everyone arriving
In ripplets on this porch,

This shabby little porch
At the end of nowhere.
Photons get to be here.