The Daredevil Trail

Morning comes cold upon St. Anthony,
the sea breathing mist across her sleeping shore,
and from the earth a staircase rises,
four hundred seventy-six steps
counted like beads upon some rosary,
each one a confession
carved into the mountain's granite hide.

I came with sunrise, when the light lay thin as ash,
and the wind moaned through the timber rails
an elegy no living tongue could form.
Up, up I climbed, my heart a hammer
striking anvils in my chest,
while gulls above wheeled through the brightening air,
witnesses to some brooding, fate.

The steps themselves seemed to be counting me,
each tread a voice in a chant
aged older than the icebergs drifting far below,
white ghosts upon a sea of slate.
My lungs grew thin, my vision swam,
and still the staircase reeled its endless coil
skyward, ever skyward, toward a crown
of rock where fog sat throned in silence.

At the summit my chest heaved, ragged with fire,
the harbor shrunk to a coin below,
boats scattered like seeds upon dark glass,
something stirred beneath the rock,
a pulse deeper than my own,
patient in its centuries of stillness.

Below, the steps already dimmed in shadow,
already singing their eternal hymn.
"Climb me once, and I shall live inside your sleep,
every riser burned into the mind's dark chambers,
till the final breath must count the final stair."

The video below is the view from the top of Daredevil Trail.