by W. S. Merwin     If I had not met the red-haired boy whose father     had broken a leg parachuting into Provence     to join the resistance in the final stage of the war     and so had been killed there as the Germans were moving north     out of Italy and if the friend who was with him     as he was dying had not had an elder brother     who also died young quite differently in peacetime     leaving two children one of them with bad health     who had been kept out of school for a whole year by an illness     and if I had written anything else at the top     of the examination form where it said college     of your choice or if the questions that day had been     put differently and if a young woman in Kittanning     had not taught my father to drive at the age of twenty     so that he got the job with the pastor of the big church     in Pittsburgh where my mother was working and if     my mother had not lost both parents when she was a child     so that she had to go to her grandmother's in Pittsburgh     I would not have found myself on an iron cot     with my head by the fireplace of a stone farmhouse     that had stood empty since some time before I was born     I would not have travelled so far to lie shivering     with fever though I was wrapped in everything in the house     nor have watched the unctuous doctor hold up his needle     at the window in the rain light of October     I would not have seen through the cracked pane the darkening     valley with its river sliding past the amber mountains     nor have wakened hearing plums fall in the small hour     thinking I knew where I was as I heard them fall

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