Nacht Music

My closed eyes have crashed against an image; I am a boat moored to a storm. I keep a notebook on the nightstand, pencil at hand – life-rafts for thoughts. A flock of crows take off at once – they clatter – it’s musical, it is an hour-long symphony played in a single moment, you hear it all but can’t separate the wing-beats. My Scots grandmother (a natural born Celt), would talk to me in her Highland tongue; sounds so beautiful that my brain would stop deciphering or even thinking. I can’t now remember her wry wisdom, not a thing, I just recall the chanting-chimes. Mozart must have leapt from his bed often. I wonder did he stumble around lighting candles, cursing the dark until he found his keyboard? Did he lay his sleepy forehead on that forte-piano willing himself to recall the bitsy songs of Pipistrelle bats? My head swings from the pillow. If I could only reach that pencil, but it has moved-on, to a place where Gaelic grannies, and jet-black crows wait to enter some other dream.