The History of Ideas, 1973-2012: Authority

Where the correlative of reason was conviction and where the correlative of power was obedience, the correlative of authority was trust

Your job—she gives another to the child

hip-high—is to heat the money in your hands

to the optimum warmth for purchase. Cagey,

the diversion in the same coin as his want.

It buys her time, enough that once

they round the corner, she might break into a sprint,

as one might with a pet who can keep up. But

the prophet makes eyes in his open fists

of the nickels’ glint, and we see he forbears

our guess her hector gets lost in the flash

when as if by swale we all give way to expel

a customer from the clench of us without her.

For what beneath the moths who have all night

to live do we brace ourselves as we approach?

We lean to find again the boy’s outguess of us.

Demand is double at the walk-up window, where

punishment for paltry want is to tell it again

into plexiglass the color of slobber, so others

in the bleach of halogen light may deal

their disparagement forward. For what if not

dishonor are we braced, rehearsing what to ask?

Repetition is a machine, a machine

for converting request into appeal; and

commerce, then, the window’s byproduct or

balm, depending. Red hot cashews, yellow bag.

Only because we visit by day do we know

at night what to call at the walk-up window

where two aisles of open merchandise end at

the sacral plates of clerks before us who, if

on pulleys they were carts instead or vending claws,

would be by now concussed and dented by

lever malevolence outright.

The prophet stands eye level

with the vending plunge, a here and now mechanism

he would need to invent to operate, and stands

between it and his mother. Yellow bag.

Because there is not enough money in the world, people steal;... because there is not enough recognition, they make art

Source: A Several World (Nightboat Books, 2014)