Nina Romano

Between Itaka and Kefalonia

Love
sparkles
between us,
as we sail in-between islands,
snuggling off island paths
between a host
of pine and olive trees
of the Ionian sea.

We bask beneath a cobalt sky
on a smuggler's cliff
then dip into the emerald sea below. 
There's a cutaway reef
between the islands
of Itaka and Kefalonia;
adventurous swimmers 
seek it out to dive.

At the quay
one late summer morning 
in between breakfast and a sail,
lovers wash each other 
in an icy communal shower—
cold feet touch
for tiptoe kisses.  
Sniffles in stiff 
morning air— 
a telltale sign 
autumn is but a touch away, 
distance measured by the wind, 
its mourning mantle covers the sky.  

A sea of Limbo stretches
between where we're docked
and the sunrise out before us, 
indeed, sun and sea blind before us,
liquid steel in motion 
steaming with the rising sun. 

The dying days of August prove 
an early fall this year. 
I sense the end of summer near; 
its finality drawing close. 
This first chill—the Mistral's majesty  
followed by the rain—all too soon. 
Where does the warmth of summer 
go chastised between wind and hail?
Where will the summer lovers
now swaddled and sheathed, 
quarter over winter?


© 2008 Nina Romano

Butterfly Garden

     (A quasi-purloined page from the favorite pastime & diversion notebook 
     of lepidopterist & morphologist Vladimir Nabokov, or a found poem)

                       I

In days gone by, you trod Ithaca trails, 
the same year I, too, graduated student, 
walked at Six Mile Creek, your happy hunting grounds.
But today, you've long been transmuted.
Now, considering form & structure,
I enter alone, a garden's butterfly world.   
I own molecular longings to spot you 
in one of your own discoveries,
recalling a commentary about crawling leaf-chewing critters
transforming into flying nectar-sipping beauties.


                        II


I wend & weave my way along paths 
noting the fabric of bodies:
wrought of sculptured velvety wings, 
or roughly hewn scalloped coquille Saint-Jacques. 
I spy the Julia, the Coolie, the Isabella.
Ah! and there! the variegated Malachite—mottled, veined, speckled 
green, semi-precious as its gem namesake,
far-traveled from native Trinidad and Tobago.

                                                                                                               
                        III 


Under a latticework of sky vine,
near the flowered Dutchman's Pipe, replica cocoon unopened,
yet unfurled is like the full-winged moth, so like the drooping flower spread.
Oh! mimic me, says nature imitating nature. 
Finally, Da! dear Vladimir, while you spotted an aberration 
of the Green Fritillary, here's the Gulf Fritillary,
light brown, white markings silhouette & etch
confounding doubly, grouped as flower sepals, 
a calyx to camouflage 
a chrysalis—then pupa's metamorphosis—
voilà! a butterfly enchantress.


                        IV


I stand stone still, 
a Buck-eye brushes my shoulder.
Now on my hand a genera of blue, not unlike one of yours, 
flits to rest, a respite from flight,
on my hand, uncaressable as air & art.
Beside it, the passionflower attracts mimetically
while from a diverse biosphere,
I drench myself, 
mirrored genesis, 
in the Spice-bush & the Cracker. 

© 2008 Nina Romano