Border Waters

by Gordon Johnston

Most of my life I’ve bridged them—

let the rise of concrete or wood in the road

carry me over to the other county, state, or country

which I’ve shot through, bullet piercing a paper target.

The pleasure was in passing over a line,

making progress toward a place I needed to be

with minimal resistance from the miles between.

How much of being human is making up lines, 

edges, and borders just so you can cross them?

I’m still a fired slug—but I’ve been slowed enough

to look when I come to crossings, upstream and down,

seeing the border we’ve drawn there, but glimpsing 

the river as real, too, as a place where I could drown.

Welcome to South Carolina, the road sign says.

I feel like a kid gone too far in a game: out of bounds.

The lines we imagine—we mistake them for the reason 

the river is there—as if this expedient grid carved our maps’

black ink into karst and fossil coral and sands milled

from stone over a billion years, as if watersheds were

obedient. One broken bridge, one trip on foot or horse-

back or by boat brings us back to the real scale and flow.

Every straightness and solidity melts. Only the river goes 

easily where it wants to go—a current of rock, forest, storm,

and earth that shifts but never slows, that breaks its own banks,

dissolving and coming to carry everything, me included, in its motion, 

soon. (Not soon: already. I’m a salt-grain, oblivious in the ocean.)