Variation on a Landscape
     after David Hockney’s Winter Tunnel With Snow, March

The sky drains beyond the dark plinths
of Holderness, fevers at the ridge, at the pasture’s
metal lip. Branches harden, arc and vault
above the freezing track.

Follow this tunnel. Follow its strict avenue of prayer.
Though the earth locks, turns blind
in its chapping bed. Though the land’s white eye
fastens in its lid of ice.