by W. S. Merwin

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