So like pilgrims we journeyed that spiral upward, like this nation climbing to windy upward reaches. At thirteen, he was fleeter than I, curious, looking down over the side. I had the image of John Winthrop climbing alone and stolid, sure Corton Mather out of breath near the peak. Suddenly, we were looking a hundred feet straight down at water glassy and land richly green. Nights random handfuls of stars are tossed there.
Light breaks over that promontory under the steady stars.
When the weather comes over this stonework to the sky by dawn this edifice perpetually edges into sunlight. In the chill, the splash, the aching rise and fall, the knots of gray, in the rolling ropes of ocean ghost light sails a changing sky. As we face the fog which creeps the jutting jetty of rock and sand barefoot on this shore we leave these footprints of our own. And time is a breathless stumbling run into the mist as morning shifts over the steps we leave to tides that vanish into ocean's song. These waves will break and winds will kick, the gliding gull will cry, an aisle of sun like candlelight will shake on this gray glass to mirror where the ocean ends and where the sky begins, sand mirror ocean waterswept where our footprints lead away.