MAMA SAID, MAMA SAID
Mama said, Whatever you do, just stay away
from the river… so I became Tom Sawyer
and made the Piscataquis my Mississippi
where we'd fish from small boulders and
fall in every day, trying to float that old
door as a raft poled by broomsticks, just like
Fess Parker and Buddy Ebsen in the movie
Davy Crockett and the River Pirates— and
we'd haunt the old off-limits Indian cave
where some kid fell off a ledge and died
the year before, us believing we'd find
arrowheads and maybe his ghost, but
finding only graffiti… and after watching
Spencer Tracy and Robert Wagner rappel
down those sheer rock faces in The Mountain,
we scurried over to Nat's dad's garage for a coil
of rope, climbed up on the river's highest ledge,
and tied one end ’round a tree trunk… me going
first ’cause the squeaky wheel gets the grease…
only smoking rope-burns blistered my palms
and the fall to that rock-bottomed river bed
practically fractured my kneecaps… but I had
to keep all that secret because Mama said,
Whatever you do, just stay away
from the river…
