His Shield

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 firebrand that is life, asbestos-eyed asbestos-eared, with tattooed nap and permanent pig on the instep; he can withstand fire and won’t drown. In his unconquerable country of unpompous gusto, gold was so common none considered it; greed and 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 Carpasian linen coat, flanked by his household lion-cubs and sable retinue, he revealed a formula safer than an armorer’s: the power of relinquishing what one would keep; that is freedom. Become dinosaur- skulled, quilled or salamander-wooled, more ironshod and javelin-dressed than a hedgehog battalion of steel, but be dull. Don’t be envied or armed with a measuring rod.