I ordered coffee today from a man with eyes that bobbed and shook. Cartoonish and leering, his Halloween mask was huge as I said, regular coffee, light and sweet, please.

Muffled, but casually, he said, two dollars?

With a normal hand he took my cash. Like most of us, the disguise is never complete.

Not a good day for me. My personality was a little drop of moisture running from sunlight.

Those around me are cautious, uncertain, and wondering what will jar me from silence into criticism. Not very happy for any of us. I should live in the camper.

Poor Jerry. He just wants to have decent time with his daughter, time minced and stolen by divorce. Then there is me, the cheerless grouch grouching.

All Hallow's Eve and the lost souls come rushing. Through weak moments and sour thoughts they slip in.

Lily likes the stringy things on my feet and nibbles and tugs to undo my laces.

Today: A muddy path stamped with dog prints and bordered by pumpkin vines leads the way. Autumn reminds me of corduroy. Everything has a texture. Part of this roughness is an illusion of splotchy colors and clouds. The fall is not smooth like a key struck on the piano, the dying note a falling feather.

Autumn is a scratchy surface where plants shrivel back into the ground and darkness casts its shadows earlier at daylight's edge.

Bright orange gourds and tractors pulling bales of hay and children will distract us while morning frost glues itself to the grass.

Jerry is not home this week and the darkness hides things that frighten me.

There is nothing in the darkness that is not there in the light, he tells me.

Oh, I disagree. The moonlight plucks pockets of moisture off of random surfaces to move them across the night, rippling, what was that?

I had to run back down to the car tonight, I know.

We were 18 years old and at school and everything was new, like wet paint. We loved everything. We had a fascination with opening lines that found us shouting, that would be a great opening line!

What started us: none of us noticed the body at first. It's the first line to Robert Coover's Gerald's Party.

I still love it.

What makes a great novel, story, or any written thing at all is the first phrase. No dust cover synopsis can tout a writer's words better than the writer's words.

Does this work for poetry and music? I think so.

From Neil Young comes a provoking, forlorn line: I think I'll pack it in and buy a pick up.

I sang along. I daydreamed the way 18-year-olds do. I bought a pick up.

A 1971 Dodge Power Wagon. Two-wheel drive, three on the tree. My Toyota croaked roadside and the guy who yanked the Tercel home with a landscaper's chain stopped off at a garage to show me a truck. It was a pasty flesh color. Salmon? Pale pink? and someone spray painted its rims red and slapped an Arkansas Razorback sticker on the window.

If you start it, you can have it, he told me.

Well, he started it, and I drove it for more than a year until it was either, buy another car or buy the farm.

Another Neil Young favorite: Oh, hello Mr. Soul I dropped by to pick up a reason.

We're all looking for a reason, right? For a long time Lily was my reason, when previously each day had been a bland, limp thing. There was no satisfaction anywhere.

From Charles Bukowski: the flesh covers the bone and they put a mind in there and sometimes a soul.

Reading the comments to follow this poem someone states: Bukowski is a sad, bitter old man.

Na.

What is the point of today's blog entry? Who cares!

About tattoos. I am thinking about constellations and zodiac signs winding all around my hips, ribs, shoulders, trickling down my arms and creeping across fingers. Something like that. Folklore and myth are cool, but the stories our imaginations have ascribed to the sky linger.

Once we thought the Earth was flat. Sailors plummeted beyond the horizon -- salt shakers rolling off the table. Our minds believed our eyes. The Earth was flat.

Where are the stars? We have not yet sailed beyond that horizon to discover that we can quietly circle back to sneak up on those we left behind staring into the distance with their hands shielding their eyes.

Stars.

God! What do I do with this, she asks. She is at the bar, exasperated. Apparently her ride is drunk, and now she's stranded.

Reach out and grip his neck. Squeeze a little, I tell her.

Other people push in: I want four electric currents!

Four?

Four.

From another direction I hear, Kendra?

I'll be right there, I say.

From behind me: Kendra!

Just a sec.

Kendra!

Give me a second…

No kidding. Thursdays are this fast, demanding, and shotgun-fired at the bar.

Saturated and thick, they have liquor stamina! They are huge!

Kendra! Four more currents!

Who is driving, I ask.

Pointing, I see who they mean.

OK, four it is, I say.

I can handle this environment.

Noise and people normally bother me and during the day I slink toward quiet corners, but I thrive in the live music's slamming noise, the mess, and drunkenness at the bar.

I think it's because I am the stable piece in this environment, which soothes me. For once I can reach out and hang on to something sturdy when the turbulence is bad, and it's me. Screw everyone else. I can rely on myself. That's all I really want.

Tomorrow will be exactly two months away from the day I picked up muddy, shitty, scrawny Lily from around the corner. I still have work to do to keep her, Bandit, Hershey, and Ozzy happy and warm.

A friend asked me: What would you carve on a pumpkin?

Constellations. Patterns in the stars that appeared as scorpions, crabs, rams, bears, and warriors detailed in sparkling fireflies of light on a coal-black sky. How beautiful to see that same spark from inside a pumpkin.

Forever imaginations have pointed to stars like a finger against a frosted window, drawing meaning from clusters of light. Eyes turned upward and wondering. If left alone to think, the mind will give us an answer. Was it hallucination? A sign? The voice of spirits?

I realize this is part of my sprawling Tattoo That I Do Not Have Yet. It will start around my back or my waist and wind upward. A zodiac tumbling across flesh plucked and bloodied from an artist's needle.

I met another shepherd named Lily today.

Darker, and with more pliable ears, she was narrow and sleek like my Lily. She chased a stick someone threw, and others thought the idea was great. Like a spreading rash, everyone tossed the stick as she panted and ran.

She was exhausted finally, and I crouched down pouring bottled water into my cupped palm. She licked and lapped.

We kept Debbie company at her house after a service for Tim. We looked at photos and remembered him lightly, so that the weight of his death did not crush us.

I asked Debbie when she got Lily. Her answer amazed me.

She said, about a year ago. I got her for Tim.

Still pondering death I wandered through the house they had shared and gaped at so much food. Trays of chicken and pasta salad, baked zit, pies, pastries, cold cuts, potato chips, chicken in wine and butter sauce, fatty, salty, and tasty things covered every counter, table, sideboard and surface.

If we eat we are not crying. If we bring food we are not arriving amid bereavement with empty hands that are unable to comfort. We are useful and full of purpose as we unveil a useless potato au gratin dish. Quickly we make big important work of cleaning dirty forks and spoons, pouring coffee, and greeting guests and friends as they arrive. Meg leans on Addie and says, Oh, I am drunk! While Addie looks at Debbie L. and says, I wish I felt like you. Debbie tells her, I feel mellow, easy. She laughs a laugh I love like pulling on warm gloves, like incense.

She got up to make more Cosmos and smile and talk with friends. Timmy had died and we were here at his house and missing him.

We talked of vacations and jobs. Resumes and diets. New shoes and our children.

Where is Tim right now, and did consciousness follow him?

I miss my friend. I look at Mary, Meg, Nancy, Mike, Everyone…I have to be good to these people as often as I can. Their lives are woven together and wrap around my own.

We stare at death like a candle flame or the moon. We look endlessly, learning nothing and hoping a spark of understanding will nip away at the edges.

We can't imagine forever.

Everything we know has a bottom, a top, an ending.

Timmy is a wisp of flame to me. He will warm my hands and keep bright one small corner of my thoughts.

Death is always a surprise. We could stand facing the sunrise for years watching its pounding feet approach, then wake one morning gasping as death's blank face turns to us, or past us to strike a friend.

Death's face is our own. Reflected on the smooth opal eyes is sadness, fright, wonder, relief, hope, despair. An end perhaps? Or not. Death looks inward; it looks out. It is bound only by our thoughts and imagination.

Years ago a friend had lost her husband. While he was sick and slipping toward the end I listened each day as she talked, her face creased, and she waited. I listened as she told me about his bad night. Pain. Discomfort. Uncertainty.

When my grandmother died my friend had said, you'll remember her, and in dreams or memory she will get younger.

Possibly. Maybe I will flip through the mental images in a flash, remembering my grandmother all at once, rather than a time on a Monday when I was 10 and she sat rubbing her hands together. We were waiting for the school bus. Or again when she stayed at my apartment and mom left me a container of turkey soup to heat later on. I was at least 30.

I want to say goodbye to Timmy Eye. He was a quiet guy. He would rather hear what you were saying than talk over you. He would rather watch and listen than jump in. His few words were always the right ones.

Rarely do I bristle, but one day the first shift bartender clocked out as I took over for the night shift, and rather than join her friends, she hopped back behind the bar several times to serve them shots. The bar would not make money this way. Barking, I said, Sherri, you really need to stop that. Let me work…

Lots of sour energy coursing around inside after that.

Watching from beneath the brim of his hat, Timmy told me, sometimes things need saying.

Yes.

His energy, breath, warmth, and thought will disperse for nature to reclaim. Is he still here, but without voice or substance? Probably. The ground soaks in water that the sun draws back out and the sky returns as rain.

What freezes will thaw. What burns becomes ash. None of it disappears.

His obituary's indifferent capital letters tell me he is dead. My friend Tim with cancer inside his head prompting surgeries and fear, tears, hope, crushed hope. We visited, then we stayed away.

The obituaries and I often have coffee together since Ed died. When your friends are sick, you check.

Carefully I read the names every day.

We knew and did not want to know. Each day passed and we learned: Tim is in the hospital, or Tim is back home...

Today I found his name.

Jerry.

Do I tell him right away? Do I warn him that I am about to tell him?

I call and say, Jerry? Timmy Eye died Saturday.

On the couch later I snuggle under his ridiculous pink blanket and he says, can you believe Timmy is dead.

I look at the gray and red stubble sprouting, I look at dog hair stuck in the blanket's weave. I look out the back door at cats on our patio.

No, I tell him.

Brain cancer.

A friend, a soft laugh. Fingers worn with work. Strong hands. Timmy was a quiet man.

A couple summers ago we drove through town and I called them up. Visiting was tough. He was not Timmy the guy ready for a beer and happy to see his friends. He wasn't feeling well, and I sensed he was angry that his words would not come, that his thoughts were slow from treatments and medication.

But we spent time with him, just a little.

There is such a looming abyss of nothing between you and someone with his hands on the bottom rung of death.

I will miss my friend. I will see him in the spaces he once occupied next to his wife when we get together for Christmas, when we plan our camping trip, whenever we are together and he is not there.

Suddenly, we are one less.

The day after Timmy died I wrapped gloved hands around Jerry and held on. Wind plucked at my sunglasses and I would not know my friend had died for another day. Through falling red and orange leaves, I watched sunlight filter through an autumn tree canopy, tossing pastel shadows across the stream of motorcycles. At a Litchfield county winery gravel crunched beneath kickstands.