Portals

Anubis reaches up to vines hissing like cobras, pulls grapes down
& into his black mouth. His jackal ears, lined with gold,
quiver like willow leaves in the rising wind.

November night by November night, darkness lengthens, gathers
him to her velvet bosom, cradles him with a song, a promise
of mornings crisp as winesap apples.

Under the spell of a thinning sun, he whirls, a rain-slick dervish
reflecting sky & puddle & trees on fire with ginger/lemon/
tangerine/cinnamon.

Burying acorn & walnut, squirrels flash silver over forest floor & hill/
valley & mountainside. Anubis watches their zigzag ritual
of leap & weave & pause & stoop.

Ibis preen themselves under cypress, anoint his pointed ears with grunt
& croak, gulp crayfish, bob, bow, wait for storm to raise pond
& lake so that they may nest at winter’s lip.

Sweatered & scarfed, they come to him, women in dresses of grass stain/sky/
eggplant/tempest, take his hands cool as stone, flurry & eddy in a dance
old as sand, wine-dyed mouths ajar & laughing, portals

to the next season—obsidian-smooth, basalt-brittle,
ice-sharpened, fruitless, featherless,
vast.

~inspired by Joanna Karpowicz’s “Anubis Dancing”

***

T.M. Thomson is co-author of Frame & Mount the Sky (2017), a chapbook of ekphrastic poetry, as well the author as Strum and Lull (2019) and The Profusion (2019). She is a lover of animals, art, trees, surrealism, black and white movies, walking in autumn rains, feeding wild birds in winter, playing in spring mud, & bat-watching in summer. Her first full-length collection of poems, Plunge, was published by Uncollected Press in 2023.