Creek Baptismal

How should I address you?

Flint Creek, as the map reads?

Or is there an older word,

vowelless, a drone down under

your ten thousand tongues

of water and stone?

You talk to yourself

as if I’m not here.

To you I’m a whift

of windbone in clothes.

Tongue-tied, set loose,

I tramp down the hill.

Rootless, anonymous,

I press a new name

on your banks

with my boots.

Published in San Pedro River Review, Fall 2017