Meze

Meze or mezze /ˈmɛzeɪ/ is a selection of small dishes served in the Middle East and the Balkans as breakfast, lunch or even dinner.
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It's a meze day,
Many small poems arrayed,
A tasting menu,
Hummus and babaganoush,
Small observations,
Pita dipping,
Long writs tabled,
Unless dragged out from the wine cellar,
For another meal,
Another mood.
They'll keep,
or not.

The bay and beach have been traded in,
For Western Mass. mountains,
The highland region,
The Berkshires, the Green and the Taconic Mountains,
Formed over half a billion years ago
When Africa collided  
with North America.

(Just for a weekend, a traitor, I'm not.)

Different insects checking me out,
Crash landing in my chest hair jungle
To get a taste of a Long Island salt air,
Fresh blood and poetry from a foreign tongue.

Mount Greylock asks me what I got to say.

I said I got grey locks older than you, friend.
I am a billion years old, son of the copulation
Tween the Sun and and a passing comet,
The Atlantic,
My amniotic fluid birthstone unevaporated..

Greylock sniffs, mumbles,
just another New Yorker.

*The clouds different, thick slabs, bank-heads keeping
My sun-father from showing his true colors,
My skin seeks his restorative powers,
Burn the strain, the stress, the black circles from
Within and without, but this is a partly cloudy day.

Sooner than me, the leaves will be red and gold,
The season of long sunnier days forgotten,
The trees that
Fill the panorama,
Point their soon-to-be
Denuded branch fingers at me
Accusingly,
L'etranger,
You brought winter's chill,
A lie but perhaps not,
For they are sensing the
Inhabiting cold in me.

A strange day, every asking, passing thought
Thrown back in my face,
And stewed, stir fried up
All in vain attempts to keep warmer
Just a little bit
Longer.