A Wisp of Smoke Becomes Voluminous

In the last post I described how I combined sentences from my ever-growing collection of oddly-generated phrases into short poems (I’m using the word “poems” loosely).  If you look below you can see that the poems have to do with experiments, seagulls, the town dump, and a dangerous substance called “Tricky-Dip.”  I want to make sense out of these fragments, so I’ve tried combining them, along with other phrases from my notebook, as follows:

Boiling water on coils of rusted wire,

Condensed moisture vibrates on the refrigerator.

“What’s that noise?”

She opens the door slowly.

“Nothing here but boiled eggs!”

On the porch on her hands and knees,

Scrubbing the tilted floor

A shimmering in the broken boards,

A wisp of smoke, blown by the wind,

Turns blue, becomes voluminous.

“What was in that concoction?

Ah, tell me you didn’t use Tricky-Dip!”

I don’t know who she is, yet, but I don’t think she’s a spring chicken.  She probably lives alone, is a bit weary, resigned to the hardships of life, but also strong, kind of stocky–someone who’s worked hard all her life.  Like one of my grandmothers.  I like her already.

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