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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