How to Measure the Distance of Things

Funny and heartbreaking, Victorian poet Paul Whitby’s How to Measure the Distance of Things resides somewhere between the head and the heart. Follow the narrator as he drifts through rural Victoria and New South Wales, house-sitting. See him hug an alpaca, walk in an old quarry by moonlight, and wake up with a cat on his face. Entwined with plenty of navel-gazing and manic episodes, these little poems ask big questions with a natural voice that speaks to you like a trusted confidante. In the tradition of Charles Bukowski, but with Walt Whitman’s connection with nature, Whitby creates a poetic style that wins you over, entertains, makes you think and keeps you wanting more.

Sample

Ambulance

The sky is blue
and the trees are green.
I reckon it’s about 1:30.

Outside people
are crashing their cars,
boarding trains.
I’m not saying anything,
but still.

A good person
never forgives himself.
Is that an ambulance,
or is it the reincarnated
being reinstated?

Cows chew grass,
birds fall from the sky.
I wait at the desk
for something to happen.

Dog God

Dogs are, in the basic sense,
the exact shape of everything
that was taken from us –
as if the God of our image
pressed a dog-shaped cookie cutter
down on our doughy hearts.

There was a younger time
when we belonged to the world,
and dog was god and god was dog,
and we saw that it was good.
We waded through weeds
and muddied our clothes.

But we got too big for ourselves,
and the bigger became the small.

And Dog God didst evict
our sorry arses from Eden,
and as a parting gift
gave us a constant companion
to remind us of everything
we are and will never be.

And we watch and smile
as they jump into the lake
and chase the ducks into the sky.
For we still know how they feel
as we stand by, arms crossed
recalling another life.

Hugo

She doesn’t want to see Hugo.
She doesn’t even know she doesn’t
but I do and she doesn’t.
I tell her, “You’ll like it.
It’ll appeal to your inner child.”

But for reasons couched inside
those squelchy pink hemispheres,
she doesn’t want to see it.
She’ll resist Hugo with silence
until one of us finally dies.

I can’t know, but I suspect
it’s because it’s a boy’s fantasy.
Or maybe the title annoys her:
too Frenchy, too cliched?
Some schmaltzy kind of shit.

That’s what my mind thinks
her mind is thinking,
if she’s thinking about it at all.
She’s probably thinking about
a choc-top ice cream.

A year comes and goes.
Hugo’s probably all scratched up
in the weekly loans section.
We’re now halfway through
season three of True Blood.