Whistler’s Sketchbook: See With Me
                        after James Abbott McNeil Whistler

As London dawn unfogs to focus, a lone barge
          slips through the steaming Thames.
Church, warehouses, and smokestacks are embalmed
          in playful cloudshapes.

She docks in her kitchen window, blazed white by sunlight,
           while her back wakes an inky shadow on the swept floor.
Inside the kitchen is darkly orbed with its objects:
            scoured, hook-hung, shelved, open-mouthed.

Cloud plumes drizzle apart, draping
          the river as they depart
as two sailors chat perched on a tidal wall,
          hash all that could or could not be.

Late morning light soaks her, silks the embrasure’s stone hull,
            becomes blunted, spots a few copper pots,
while her gaze sails through the window past a shingle
            impaled against the sky. No sound but breath nosing glass.