Macports puts its libraries in non-standard locations, so to build the mysql2 gem on an OSX computer, you will need to do a little bit of extra work to ensure that gem calls make with appropriate options.
To cut a short story, very short, you do this (at least if you have macports in /opt/local (the default), and are using the mysql55 package).
$ gem install mysql2 -- --with-mysql-lib=/opt/local/lib/mysql55/mysql --with-mysql-include=/opt/local/include/mysql55/mysql