The Summer That Stayed Twenty
A poem for Rosa, Crémenes, 1971
I came to León for the mountains,
for the patient arithmetic of rock,
a hammer, a notebook, a boy’s certainty
that the Earth was the only thing
worth kneeling for.
I did not come for you.
Nothing worth having
ever announces itself in advance.
•
Crémenes kept time
the way old stone keeps warmth —
slowly, reluctantly, all the way through the night.
Bells measured the hours
so the village would not have to.
Shepherds moved their flocks like slow clouds
across a hillside that had learned
to hold the evening light
a little longer than it should.
And there, between the dining room
and the kitchen, unhurried,
not trying — never needing to try —
you.
•
I climbed every morning with my maps.
I came down every afternoon
faster than the trail required,
telling myself it was the hunger,
the light, the good day’s work.
It was you.
The mountains did not get smaller.
I simply stopped measuring them
against anything but the hour
I would see you again.
•
Small things.
Only small things —
lavender caught on the hem of a passing dress,
chestnut hair holding the last of the sun,
my own name, softened
in a voice that had never said it before.
I have lost, since then,
whole years of careful data.
Rock formations. Contract clauses.
Cities whose hotels I could not now describe.
I have not lost the bread smell
of that kitchen at seven in the morning,
or the particular way
your laughter moved through stone walls
like something that belonged there
before either of us arrived.
•
Evenings were ours
the way certain rooms belong
only to the people who once sat quietly in them.
We talked for hours.
We said almost nothing.
Both were forms of the same fullness.
Stars gathered over that valley
in numbers the north had never shown me —
as if the sky, too,
had decided to stay up late
and watch.
•
Your hand found mine
without asking permission,
without apology,
the way water finds
the lowest, truest point in any field
because it has no other choice.
Neither of us spoke.
Some agreements
are only ever signed in silence.
•
The first kiss was not fire.
It was quiet —
the particular quiet of arriving
somewhere you didn’t know
you had been travelling toward
for twenty years and two thousand kilometres.
I had never felt further from home.
I had never felt less like a stranger.
•
We were young enough to believe
a summer could refuse to end
simply because we wanted it to.
We were wrong.
But I have come to think
that this particular wrongness
is the only inheritance
worth handing down —
because without it,
no one would ever love
so completely, so without a ledger,
so without asking first
what it would cost.
•
Continents came after.
Careers came after.
Every road a geologist walks
eventually walks him away
from the village where he learned
that some ground
does not need core samples
to be trusted.
But return, even now,
to Crémenes in memory,
and she is still standing
in that doorway between rooms —
not posing,
not waiting exactly,
just there,
the way certain evenings
never fully set —
and she turns,
and she smiles,
and her hand finds mine again
across more than fifty years,
and for as long as a single evening lasts,
we are both twenty,
and the mountains
have not yet let us go.
⸻
Marcel P.T. Chin-A-Lien