Self-Portrait as Sancho Panza

I doubted everything
and I believed everything.

It was my theology or affliction.

My first memory
was a story my mother told
which never happened.

My second memory
was unphotographed and lost forever.

When I left a woman,
I left her twice

and I felt
just what I’d watched
others feel
while I sat open-mouthed before the screen.

Shannon Holman, New York, 2002

published in Raised in a Barn