"Put out the fire with a blue hole."

"In December 1980," Nicholas Shakespeare writes, "Bruce [Chatwin] took Donald [Richards, his lover] to a dinner given for him by Freddy Eberstadt. Bruce had suggested the guests. His marriage [to Elizabeth] had put I'm in touch with high society in New York, but it was not the society that appealed to Elizabeth. That night they included ... Robert Wilson, Kynaston MacShine ... Keith Milow, Edward Albee, Jerzy Kosinski, Diana Vreeland and Gloria Vanderbilt. There was also Pam Bell [above], an Australian poet whom Bruce met in London. 'The people were so grand you weren't introduced,' she says ... 'You looked down the long line of tuberoses and there was Gloria Vanderbilt with diamonds literally from one tit to another. She looked like she robbed the burial mound at Ur.' Bell thought Bruce that night was at his most manic. 'He had on a dinner jacket and a bow-tie and jeans and high-heeled yellow boots. Every now and then he threw his knees up to his chin and collapsed in hyena laughter. His face was a Hallowe'en mask: ugly, hysterical, grotesque.'"

Bell presents a chilling image. After finishing Shakespeare's "New York" chapter I looked for Bell online and, with some difficulty, found three of her 1960s poems from Poetry: 1947-1989 (Toowoomba: Rowland, 1989) on a Facebook account:

Woman over Bahrain

Go ahead! Hijack me —
Time's inevitable fool.
The young men are more beautiful ...
Desire tomorrow may be met with casual pity.
Put out the fire with a blue hole.

To a young man

My dear, lie down and sleep.
There isn't time
To tap the age of waters dammed up in one scarred skin ...
And, oh the wells of love are dark and deep ... you'd drown.
It takes an age, an ancient water-course
To hold the rage of rivers,
But for you,
There will always be
Shaped by strange waters, timeless, secret,
Some mysterious pool,
Warm for your heart-break winters and midsummer cool.

Oxford Street

High, high
White cloud
And a blue sky cartwheeling down Oxford Street
In pewter puddles.
I love the crowd, the tired faces of the afternoon,
Preoccupied and inward,
Like sad buds waiting for rain.