One of the Lives

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