I’m glad you liked the ending. Actually, the ladder was just a ladder, but my hope in the poem was to animate the ladder. If I were the ladder, I would have been happy to have been alone in a garden with beautiful flowers and pines taking a break. 

And, because a ladder can have a human-ish shape, it’s not hard to imagine it being a symbol or a metaphor for some type of person as well. So it sort of works both ways.