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