Leading Edge Issue 62, "Friend, Inc."

He got his best ideas from reading the works of Dostoyevsky And found happiness by making friends with a few small animals.

He was the lady’s man at the cocktail party who played the violin— The one at the Zurich railway station holding a bouquet of red flowers; The clown sticking his tongue out at the bottom of Pandora’s box.

In the years that followed, the unfathomably bizarre became commonplace.

Every insect & star seemed to dance to the same mysterious tune And the fate of the human race hinged on the wings of the honeybee.

God’s power was found in every atom, but nowhere in the hearts of men, Proving the improbability of any paradise based on a roll of the dice.

The future he imagined at 21 turned out to be a pacifist’s worst nightmare; He gambled his family & married life away for a little Nobel Prize money And conducted lecturers at Cambridge wearing carpet slippers without socks.

He loved sailing & kept up a salty correspondence with Marilyn Monroe, Reducing everything to the formula “Boredom Equals Eternity”.

I saw him last night splitting hairs in the halo-nimbus of a solar eclipse, His lonely ghost winking back at me from a singing singularity.

Imagination curved around his elbow toward a thumbprint in cosmic awe; The moon played hide-n-seek with time & space out in the Milky Way Where the simple wonder in a child’s eyes is our only compass rose!