Michael Cross's "Sacred"*

Sacred


Evental grace governs a multiplicity in excess of itself, one that is indescribable, superabundant relative to itself as well as with respect to the fixed distributions of the law.

Alain Badiou



For the abyss is the poet’s figure for the perpetual suspension of the right measure or law—that crisis, that “state of exception” in which, sent on our way by the gods, we are—for the time being—destined to live.

David Michael Kleinberg-Levin



What is called “grace” is the capacity of a postevental multiplicity to exceed its own limit, a limit that has a commandment of the law as its dead cipher. The opposition grace/law encompasses two doctrines of the multiple.

Alain Badiou









foregone for what’s wanting the bridge sez the size of the _quodlibet_

twenty-some casts (2001, 900 x 510 x 240 cm) according to gauge accordingly resin to gauge

scant forth attuned his plinth abut the Square, in-set coat disclose

the Tangerine dais as the _count-for-one_, then, thousands of mouths in the round,

black resin LAW in each slit has an animal upright, lash against the Ister, all

whilst warrant the monarch’s cairn, ‘his’ trestle (1765-1837) vantage for the pigeon

certainly bound by militant pitch certainly viscous amber

slag against the asphalt does to thinking for a turn involve







the militant wants the pass a bare right planar face

degrees from the flat while / transalpine coup as mare portraiture

circa 1848: a hand at degrees against the ribs—hock or tarsus, knee or stifle, brisket, feathering

this is a grid according to one’s planar order is a length and breadth mantled at degrees against the
ribcage]

opens out munitions piece—the flank I counter munitions in pantone grays, presumably liters

of blood wet the pavement, pierce Juliette Récamier, married to recline at the chaise

for François Gerard’s limit demands her bare pig’s kind of lawlessness or else the leap

from _condition_ to the morass of tempo-nodal captivation in terms of the eschatological

limits of lake-red-belts adjacent the starred asphalt lot’s blood and pencil pointing from Ashura,

sublimation once intoxication of interior / machete as the rite null set






two skulls slightly askant as the scale of communion and the police draped

summa (_whole_) crushed velvet, C, supremast, girder forms an intercessor for

what’s inside and what cant lead, obsessed with the shoulder and the lion

mouth full twined mail (entwined scales) or the face in repose of one slate,

here the joist immured of snakes and worms cant cede in lieu of bronzed

yoke wagging from the firth at croisillon nord / the corpses in fans

breast-width at the crest south and the west enforced walls of the thirteenth

century, the bodied knots of incisors against the barricades of the fifteenth,

these veils tear the eyes this sovereign paraclete, more LOW







inside, cerates both alum twice over / portage _purely formal void_ as anterior place holder,

cartouche, one margin slightly landed, Sovran—repose // serried ranks,

the “Hexe” moored higher if deterred this special rank the diagrammed grounds

once more hundreds by the ankles of a steel pylon, in other words, the lawlessness

I’ve swoll the fundament’s juridical torque so they won’t see the liter or the mote

or re- / enframed Peter Eisemen’s _House VI_ for the ENCLOSERS say a strophe,

from pewter’s repose’ve wandered / from one convex strophe to standstill

descendible: _the colonized future may be something like one of Veblan's “imponderables,”

as Zukofsky cites, and the blank becomes the only space from which to unsettle the habit of

its axiomatic power in the interest of an other future //_ grace this “sets” imponderable

a tympan is to sound between relief and its impression, the recessed face of a pediment

juridical sites of dissensus because on this one, the resin slightly elevated, it’s a room,

the _demos_, three elements of plastic and urethane foam (prolix plinths)







the second dual-monitor plaster in relief to _Breathless_

lake-fans asymmetry, lake-red symmetrical rivulets, alluvial fans one print in the window’s

an octagon in Algeria this one octagon _Kenya Boran_ (1974) removed to Houston

and finally Rice one’s back against the eight to view the rhombus (brown/shed/slake)

above the ziggurat and falls: grace in the _light_ of the rhombus—_Spirit’s watted filament_

in the hands in whose hands lie means, dope and cue of one’s own _dure_ // (chapter/verse)

_ochereous and lynx-barred in lengthening might; / Patience! and you shall reach the biding place! //

Here are lynxes Here are lynxes, / Is there a sound in the forest / of pard or of bassarid /

or crotale or of leaves moving //_

Sweaters of the corpuscle, twain labor, the lynx heads, a dazzle








red grace of sellotape and air paired next “folk” heads sleckit, cowrin

folk for the serotype of grace seemed lately to plait, agnate by a toxin

as many wolves as bird-roads red scotch such vast, timorous interface

sans surface dimension so to socius as “white eschatology” in Twombly’s coronation of seostis

his socle, frame, pedestal, seal an infinite sovereign efflux, fens drained, its waste Enclosure

arrived at Helpstone in 1809 to mount and did duration’s a quality chalk and charcoal matrices

held by condition of score—held to grooves and yet to flute the rim—held by abeyance of white, chariot

volant athwart the grass air held to—the chariot harbors calm, seven frames in bed when you age, a gilt

wink of art’s autonomy / sovereignty swoll on the general matrices aver to contact each

each nominal surface a face, each press and rivet face, tocsin, period of vibration off the tangerine ring of autonomy







horn’s portraits prolix matte bulbs for eyes how weather renders

the dome identically vacuous, carriage on the trunk brushed orange as a product of _policing_

some six by ten grills a jerk from the down-orange grip of plumule descending his neck

he’s radiating, this man, somatic folds of deep ontic orange limbic arcs

slacks sticking from the hedge mark a thin rim of dissensus Scalapino calls _event horizon_

yellow circle-concepts sitting on the thorax reading for corpses are a dozen balloons from the vantage

above the field of bodies painting Augustin Lesage’s sublime symbolic composition of the spiritual world

with tunneling lamp recurrent as the vortices of “Zodiac Houses” contra passione, contra mille acque, contra

fonte, contra voce, contra requiem, contra the fold’s lip the deep orange pleat its intimate orange fosse, I draw a circle

I draw a cluster of arcs from the circle labeled _monads_, I write _WORLD AND EARTH_


*Sacred was sent to me by Cross, April 2006. He has kindly allowed me to post it for eventual comment.