Welcome

I greet you
in the doorway
of the plain house
of your ancestors,

where you are standing
even though you’re not
yet born:  you pass through
the door and do not look back,

walk the yard ignoring the feel
of grass below your bare and tender feet,
you will not remember this later, you will be
surprised by it, the folding of it underfoot,

the soft staining of your heels and soles,
you will forget it and the house so warm
and comfortable, sparely furnished with only
necessities, you will clutter your own homes

with toys and gadgets and huge furniture, beds
the size of entire rooms, closets larger than the kitchen
and its smells, its deep banquets and crowded feasts,
you will forget this pyramid of family crowned with living

as well as possible in a hard world, you will forget it all
until a day comes when you seek out the source of the longing
you suddenly feel as you look around at the clogged rooms
of your own monster homes, your interconnected empty relations

with those a thousand miles away with whom you share
only one common interest, you will recall this when you can’t stand
the rage you feel at the empty lawn out front, the gray cars, the roads
lined with similar homes as full of inchoate anger and sadness and

unfamiliar faces, the ones you pass in the morning and at night
and do not acknowledge; that day you will begin to claim
a true life of your own.  I greet you coming out into the forgetting
that is the world.   Welcome: I greet you knowing that you will not remember me ever,

for I am the forgettable man who knows what will happen to you,
to whom it has already happened and who will watch
as you flail through, living toward a thing called contentment, a thing
I wasn’t made for because someone has to stand aside from it, greet you,

turn away shaking my head and thinking hard about how I was never able
to forget a thing and thus rediscover it.  I greet you knowing
how separate we always will be from one another.  Welcome to a world
denied to me, such an enviable place, such a good place to lose and recapture, to be in exile from.