From "Tortoise-Shell":"It needed Pythagoras to see life playing with counters on the living back
Of the baby tortoise;
Life establishing the first mathematical tablet,
Not in stone, like the Judean Lord, or bronze, but in life-clouded, life-rosy tortoise shell.
The first little mathematical gentleman
Stepping, wee mite, in his loose trousers
Under all the eternal dome of mathematical law." (Birds, Beasts & Flowers, 115)
I won't even get into "Bibbles," where he calls his French bulldog "[y]ou little Walt-Whitmanesque bitch."
