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