While I lay between waking and sleeping, my father sometimes sat down at his piano.  I used to think the wide, strong, rising chords he began with (as a way of flexing his fingers and as an alternative to scales, maybe) were like stanchions or the feet of a great bridge straddling dangerous, dark water: 

at nights I heard
you play – while you charmed babeldom I slept*

*Kevin Crossley-Holland, Selected Poems: from ‘Sounds’.