April Fox

My little girl has these little wooden discs 
--cookies, my friend calls them
with faces on them
Her great-aunt got them for her and we play a game with them
lay them out on her little kid-sized table
"This one is happy," I say. 
"Look."
Pointing.
"Happy."
She looks, and I offer two more. One happy, one I don't know,
something else. 
"Which one is happy?"
She looks again, grabs, makes a match. 
She doesn't have words yet, not many anyway, even at five, but she makes a happy sound
She likes when things match up.
She makes patterns, matches, and I comment now and then
"These are feelings. This face is happy, see? Happy.
This one is mad. Sometimes you feel mad. This one is sad."
Feelings are good, I tell her 
but decisions should be based on logic.

I've lived by that for quite a while, let myself feel things
of course
but moved only when propelled by logic
pragmatism
the comforting presence
of rational thought
Something can be real
and still irrelevant.

By a campfire once
fueled by the flames of cheap beer 
and the weight of a life 
poorly lived 
having lifted
I laughed alongside someone who had offered to walk with me
anywhere,
"Nothing is relevant."

He says that back to me now,
with the smell of woodsmoke long since washed away
the corner of his mouth turned up
just a little
and I know he was listening
to all of it. 

He taps his foot
across the room, and I tell the baby,
"Look,
look."

Look at all of this.