Stacked Spirals of Stardust

 

October 2, 2010

After witnessing the dedication of the luminous stacked spirals of Stardust, which now hang forever in memory of Esme Louise Kenney at the new School for the Creative and Performing Arts in Cincinnati where she attended until she was taken from this world, I found myself seeing metaphors in kind everywhere. I heard a poem read about stacked layers of hot Earth and cold ground laid out and looking up at  the Milky Way, arms spiraling from its center, just like Stardust. After the dedication, I watched a stack of prone admirers under the memorial gazing up, legs spiraling from their center, just like Stardust.

At Spring Grove Cemetery later in the day I saw an ant with a dark abdomen and red thorax and head emerge with wings from its nest on the spot where angelic Esme’s gurney had been rolled. It crawled around in the grass, not sure what it was supposed to do with its newly sprouted wings. Then it suddenly took off and spiraled, just like Stardust,  around the nest opening before flying away from its wingless neighbors, a terrestrial creature now an angel too, telling stories about flights to heaven and back.

If there are trees in heaven of which the ant can speak, then I’m sure they include trees like this memorial one that adorns “Esme’s Spot” where I saw the ant in Spring Grove. A weeping variety called Higgins cherry, it serves as an enduring, yet growing, changing symbol of her organic spirit, its branches weaving, elongating throughout her survivor’s memories of her and reminding them that her light can help them grow too, just like leaves in light that serve as windows into the souls of trees. I couldn’t help but notice also how its branches seemed to spiral from the trunk, just like Stardust.

After this I was witness to a prone supplicant during a long, wet, and windy night gazing up at Star Tower, the red beacon blinking slowly atop its highest point like a metronome as it marked the hours the supplicant spent in the lonely and terrifying stack of invasive shrubs behind the reservoir where Esme was killed, its bowery brambles spiraling, just like Stardust.

And on the lonely trek back to Chicago, astonished by what I had seen and felt that weekend, I stared awestruck up at a stack of cumulus clouds over an Indiana wind farm that stretched from horizon to horizon, the turbines of each mill slowly spiraling, just like Stardust.