Counting sheep

There's a gap in the dry-stone wall
on Shap Fell near Huck's Brow -
many years ago, yet now
in this dark game of going to sleep.
The first sheep thinks about going through,
a greyish white creature, a blackish wall.
Green grass. The animal hesitates.
It runs through, stamping its feet.
Second in the queue won't go through
It turns in a half circle and is lost
in the ninety eight strong milling herd.
Another two go through.
There are now numbers one, three and four
in meadow two, but that named two somewhere
in pasture one. Another one goes through.
OK, four yearlings in the new enclosure,
eyeing each other and the uncropped fodder.
There's a rainbow over the fell.
Pale greens in the hillside and dull sky,
a different colour from the Dollies or the wall
and paler inside the arc than outside.
An outer curve appears, a double bow.
Now there are ten clowns in the growing hay,
nintely before the gate. Has the hesitator
gone through? Impossible to say.
Which idiot said counting thus
leads to the land of nod? I click a switch
and write this. I know I shall doze off,
I am fairly confident of it tonight,
that is, before tomorrow morning.
The baa-lambs fade away and not into
my dreams. The question is this:
do the hundred quadrupeds exist or not?
Perhaps only those who
got through the gap. Or
she whose identity
was lost in the crowd.
Or perhaps they all do in the place
with weather phenomena, in the Lake District.
Surely there were not exactly a centurion,
that could never be ascertained
and why that species? Moveable countable
white woolly shapes with faces and feet
and personalities confused in the masses.
I give up. The unshaded light bulb
(not lit) on the ceiling has a shadow
from my bedside lamp. It is waisted
and looks very much like a violin.
I could go to sleep counting musical instruments.
This is turning out to be one of those poems
that won't stop, like the few minutes
in which you intended dozing off,
but you didn't, so this happened,
and look at you now. Start again.
A double colour scale in Cumbria.
Darkly amused, I court delirium.

Saly Evans