I was twenty-eight and had just moved to the city from a little farm in New England with a drafty, uninsulated, wood-heated farmhouse. Break it up now I’m gonna go. I accidentally moved into the neighborhood where my great grandfather was born—Greenpoint. He lived across from the muscular Monitor & Merrimack statue, at 181 Monitor Street—an address I wouldn’t know for another decade. Now I have no trees. Actually, I had those London plane trees in McGolrick Park for company. I would sit there in the park, with my coffee and write. And when we dream it. In New York City, I mostly worked—at Lucky Strike, the restaurant in SoHo. Even on days off, I ate at the restaurant, using my “food credits” for salmon with haricots verts drenched in truffle oil and a jalapeno guava margarita. Baby, calm down, better calm down. When I wasn’t working, I wrote in the park, in Housing Works, on the train, in my little blue room in a hammock I made out of a canvas drop cloth I bought at the hardware store. James Logenbach writes of you, that you know “a poet suffers to make sentences.” He quotes an address you made to John Ashbery: You, being a poet, know that all these awards and accolades do not diminish the suffering, the sacrifice, the blood, the sweat, that all true poets have to go through. You being a poet, know that I have to stare into the window on Grand Street where the restaurant used to be. I am pressing on the glass. And I haunt Greenpoint. I am not pretending. I am standing where an orchard used to be. I can see it. I am putting my hand to the marble. Like my great grandfather, I’m a stone cutter.
-Morgan English