Tuesday Poem: “The Autistic Cloudboy Visits Auckland Art Gallery” by Siobhan Harvey

The Autistic Cloudboy Visits Auckland Art Gallery

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1. Taranaki (and cloud), Wanganui, 15 April 1986

Studying Aberhart, Cloudboy takes up a camera, empties land

of everyone except his mother, pictures the bare pathos of

what remains in photography, in black and white clouds.

2. A Pair of Godwits

Studying Palmer, Cloudboy wings his mother to canvas

desolate as a godwit’s flight; below cadmium sky, in oily air,

they nest until the pull of somewhere else – a cloud – rises

them to portray each other at the...