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Chris Pannell
 In
1996, the Jasper Press published Chris Pannell's first solo collection
of poetry, three broadsheets entitled Fractures, Subluxations
and Dislocations. This set subsequently won the Hamilton and Region
Arts Council poetry book award.
In 1999, his first full-length book, entitled Sorry I Spent Your
Poem, was published by watershedBooks. Since 1993 he has led the
new writing workshop at Hamilton Artists Inc. He edited both anthologies
the group has produced: Your Baggage is in Buffalo (1994) and
Between a Dock and a High Place (1997).
His non-fiction has appeared in The Globe and Mail and in various
computer industry journals. He lives in Hamilton, Ontario.
The
League of Canadian Poets
Poetry By Chris Pannell
Dream Bus
The Fin Whale at Cheticamp
Dream
Bus
I am driving a school bus through
an Alex Colville painting,
the moon is setting after a full night
of wrecking sleep.
Creamy and large at the horizon,
traditional and bitter
to the tongue, she makes me ashamed
of my weak headlights,
the lies I told today.
Moon salt falls on
the trees and road, turns them blue
too indigo to bear,
now she’s down to the rim
of the sky, oval and orange.
Fields of snow rise,
take her full belly into their valleys and creeks.
Tomorrow night
hundreds of premonitions
will hover,
stone white,
bathed by brushes.
From the corner of my eye
I see the painter’s pallet flash
and I floor it,
all thirty eight feet of straight lines and red lights,
rip into this curve
scraping steel
screams against the guard rail,
cables and wooden posts pop free
staples from the tight canvas
fly past the windshield,
the collapsing frame
straight
into the gully
of pine
darkness.
© 2003 Chris Pannell
The Fin Whale at Cheticamp
There were no life jackets on the lobster boat
our pilot took into the sway blue-green
that curled to the horizon. Every moment
hope rose and was dashed against the hull.
Eyes were tricked, and again were tricked,
give up, give out, give over the sea said,
while cormorants gathered above the crests
looking for the white blow stream.
We, so noisy and slow in the glinting cold
where waves might be the tails of whales.
Then —
close enough to surprise even our pilot —
we saw the fin so small for the seventy tons
coming directly at the port side of the bow.
He could have flipped us
or split us with one short smash of snout.
But he dived instead, sank his power
to its salty zenith
and surfaced many yards off,
blow spout showering.
He knew us to be fragile wood and glass bobbing
in the Gulf of St. Lawrence so cold and he so huge and warm,
his shadow a black, inert spot, interrupting the ocean.
We were calmed, inspected
and he — holding no grudge for those thousands of hunts
which had ended with thrashing blood-red water —
saw our cameras, how we needed
to see him
to be vulnerable ever-bobbing
to watch one trick,
like a back flop or dive, tail perpendicular,
to discover
we had been enriched by his mercy.
© 2003 Chris Pannell
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