Lucha Libre!

So after school on friday, this last friday, I didn't go straight home. Instead, I helped in preparation for our school's multi-cultural fair coming up. But, even after that I wanted to go to the library. My highschool is an easy walk from the Central Library, and thank goodness because I'm quite fond of it. With a quick pace, (which was challenging because I had a two-ton backpack strapped to me), I skedaddled to the square, burst through the entrance, and found myself wide-eyed with Poe, dreamy with Hemingway, and perplexed with Thoreau in the poetry aisle near the back of the bottom floor. A lot of people like to read poetry. But what always shocks me is how people  "get it", so easily. I stared at "The Watch-tower of the Soul" by Anna Hempstead Branch till my eyes melted like plastic to the thin pages and still, I have deciphered about 2% of it. At least I believe so. Poetry is a big bag of IFs.

On the way down I caught sight of an old man and his son. At least I'm guessing it was his son. The old man had no legs starting at his hips. They were both on the same computer looking at pictures of Lucha Libre, hispanic wrestlers. The old man seemed deep in thought, staring at the colorful masks they wore, as if they too were some complicated poem. Maybe they were.
 Upstairs there's this little window with a desk near it, and a big comfy chair. I chose the big comfy chair and plunged into "Poetry 180", a collection-of-poems-book I had snatched from downstairs. (Online here: Poetry 180 ). I looked up from my book out the window, and saw the son that was sitting at the computer, wheeling his dad to their van. For some reason I jumped up and pressed my forehead, cool, against the glass and watched. The lady sitting at the desk beside me looked up from her laptop. The old man waited close in his wheelchair, as his son opened the door.
 Then something that pulled me even closer to the glass happened. The son picked up his dad carefully, like a baby he knew and loved, and carried him, slowly, up up up the steps and into his seat. I don't know why this made me hold my breath. But since I held it hostage in the jails of my rib cage, my eyes got wet and all of a sudden I didn't feel like reading poetry and the lady was probably looking at me but I stood at the window till the old red van emptied from the street.
What if one day that was my mom. I saw my mom all alone and crippled in a house with a care-taker that didn't love her. Then, I saw me carrying her away, into my car and taking her with me to the library to look at Lucha Libre. I saw my dad, a thin and frail version in my arms, too. I saw us talking about God in two of the chairs close to a window of the upstairs section.
What I saw outside the glass was beautiful. It was a love without the cheesy romance, nor roses and chocolates. There was no money. It was to the library, and it was a red van, and it was its own poem that was hard to understand, yet plain as morning light.