The smartest man I've known

My Dad, most likely In his early 30s.

My father was the smartest man I've known,
in many ways the wisest,
and yet he too was foolish.
He knew multiple languages
learned ancient Greek in middle age
understood Plato and Sophocles, John Donne and T.S. Eliot
yet continued to smoke cigarettes too long
to live into old age.
He knew well the dangers of arrogance
the fate of nations or city states
like the Athens he held among the highest of man's accomplishments
yet knew better too, he seemed to think, 
than his doctors and their directives.
He wrote brilliantly, in prose that rose above its academic peers
and left scribbled notes in books
penciled in tiny graphite strokes,
that wondered, like Socrates, about fundamental things
and their causes,
asked 10,000 questions.
And yet he left us, left me, too early,
and even before his death,
for the safety of his study and the succor of his books.
His patrimony was a mountain of memories & stories,
odds bits of knowledge -- and a deep hole never to be filled
or plumbed.