Nova Hart

-        For Grant Hart, 1961-2017

 

a man too young to be so old

weathered by heartbreak, heroin and happenstance

decked in jeans and wingtips, torn shirt and glasses,

strapped with a vintage guitar tuned approximately,

alone on stage at the mic

transmuting the volume of youth into the pain of age,

singing out of a place few reach,

a place deep and free from theatrics,

a man once broken and held together by his art

singing to a half-filled room, past the audience

to some version of himself he hasn’t met

on a train riding foreign tracks.

It kills you a little bit to hear the song

and understand that listening is not living,

just a scattered path to Hope.