two poems

by Natalie Marino

Elegy to Self [1]

You seem like the world in your posture of surrender.

In its mortal flame, the light envelops you.

In you the rivers sing and my soul flies to them

like a language, a tongue full of wars and songs.

My words thin themselves like the tread of gulls on beaches.

You, I remember as you were last autumn.

The nocturnal birds peck at the first stars.

The water walks barefoot along the soaking streets.

I go, hardened by passions, mounted on my only wave,

we have lost even this twilight. 

Forge of blue metals, night of quiet fights,

and you sadden suddenly like a voyage.  

Between lips and voice, something goes dying.

I love you, and my happiness bites your mouth, a plum.

Butterfly of sleep and dream, you seem like my soul.

My soul is torn at the shore of your eyes of mourning.

Hour of nostalgia, hour of happiness, hour of loneliness,

here I love you

as the wheat field and the sun, the poppy and the water.

That is all. In the distance someone sings. In the distance.

It emerges, your memory, from the night in which I am.

[1] This poem is a cento. Each successive line is from poems 1-21 in Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, translated by J. Simon Harris from the original collection written in Spanish by Pablo Neruda, in the order that that they appear.

Virginia Writes to Vita

and still doesn’t know

what love is.

The night is blue

in green.

The night is a blackbird

searching for one dolphin

in a bedfull of oysters[1].

There are no martyrs

here.

The only point

of continuing

to row this old boat

is to help another

through.

[1] in a letter from Virginia Woolf to Vita Sackville-West when she was jealous of Vita’s relationships with other women, Virginia imagines Vita as a “dolphin” eating “a whole bedfull of oysters”

Photo of Natalie Marino

BIO: Natalie Marino is a poet and practicing physician. Her work appears in Heavy Feather Review, Little Patuxent Review, Pleiades, Salt Hill, wildness and elsewhere. She is the author of the chapbook Under Memories of Stars (Finishing Line Press, 2023). She lives in California. You can find her online at nataliemarino.com or on Instagram @natalie_marino.