Endless Marble Sculpture
Zach Richter
June 13, 2008

"Endless Marble Sculpture" is a prose poem by Zach Richter published in the 1996 issue of Edge.

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When I came into the room, their speech was scattered in the air. Upon a counter, flowers spread across the endless marble sculpture. Like Joan of Arc rattling against their grave injustice, a new spirit-watching ghost of countless epilepsies.

Unless their scattered voices still remain within a notebook or recorder or a Hammond or are on videotape, the group's collective memory reduces to a whisper and the haunting recollections of the other swirling spirits.

But the memory will not be left in physical form. It carries on to separation of what's here and then what's left. In continuing the presence absence presence absence cycle, we reduce our lives to action without any contribution.

But with art the spirits carry on our message to us mortals: the rejection of the selfishness that leads our paths astray. For through our information, we can open up the portals which allow these firey moments an infinity to stay.