Here's a section from Stalwart Glum, a long poem I wrote in the mid-nineteen-eighties, while supposedly doing my job cataloguing rare books in the Brown library. I stuck it in a melancholy drawer:

Walking dim-backwards through the snow,
I fell through Akhmatova's tomb, with stalwart grasp
Of Poe's echt-grease-stain, Hart-Crane bound.
Providence could not hold wise Henry's Oracle,

Christened with calamari on an antique plate,
Jealous of supermarket crosshairs in a Brodsky sprezzatura.
Whole grievances of millenarian grime died out
On the dusky plain. An Anglican primate wrenched the dawn...

[Nota bene: "Oracle" was the name of my grandmother's Siamese cat, who loved to eat squid off my Puritan ancestor's pewter.]