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Auburn
Reading about conspiracy and moral declinein our independent study, my professordefined ingenium—hard g—as character,something he and I didn’t necessarily have.
I was always going down with someone,going soft as the gin Steve gave me in the beginning.Were we translating in a hallway?Hooking him up by then
was close enough to hooking up with him,I see now, a professor myself, rememberingthe stiff impress of his prickwhen we hugged goodbye.
What was the differencebetween what I lacked and what I wasn’tgiven? Can it be learnedthis late, integrity, even
if Latin can’t, or won’t?Raised from the ruins, from wherethere were none,can walls go up?
And will the definitions hold?The more-than-walls, the something protected inside,innate soil, or soul—can it abide? [End Page 144]
Poet and critic austin segrest is the author of Door to Remain (unt Press, 2022), winner of the 2021 Vassar Miller Poetry Prize. His poems can be found in poetry, The Common, Ecotone, The Threepenny Review, and many others. He was a 2018–19 poetry fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Born and raised in Alabama, Austin teaches at Lawrence University in Wisconsin.
