The pin-swin or spine-swine (the edgehog miscalled hedgehog) with all his edges out, echidna and echinoderm in distressed-pin-cushion thorn-fur coats, the spiny pig or porcupine, the rhino with horned snout– everything is battle-dressed.
Pig-fur won’t do,
I’ll wrap myself in salamander-skin like Presbyter John. A lizard in the midst of flames, a firebrandthat is life, asbestos-eyed asbestos-eared, with tattooed nap and permanent pig on the instep; he can withstandfire and won’t drown.
In his unconquerable country of unpompous gusto, gold was so common none considered it; greedand flattery were unknown.
Though rubies large as tennis- balls conjoined in streams so that the mountain seemed to bleed,the inextinguishable salamander styled himself but presbyter.
His shield was his humility.
In Carpasianlinen coat, flanked by his household lion-cubs and sable retinue, he revealed a formula safer thanan armorer’s: the power of relinquishing what one would keep; that is freedom.
Become dinosaur- skulled, quilled or salamander-wooled, more ironshodand javelin-dressed than a hedgehog battalion of steel, but be dull.
Don’t be envied or armed with a measuring rod.
