While driving to Ikea for a laundry basket

by Heidi Beck — our Friday Poem on 11/10/2024

Deceptively quiet, this poem packs a punch. The ordinariness of a trip to Ikea for a laundry basket (of all things!) is placed beside a conversation about multiple universes. It's almost absurd. And yet one specific detail  ("my child never swallows / too many pills") is slipped in. No wonder the first-person narrator needs to believe "all isn't lost". Then life itself sends one of its unasked-for emblems: an old man clearing debris, followed by another "clearing the gutter". Noticing the weight other people bear "on every road" — this changes everything.

While driving to Ikea for a laundry basket

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we debate the universe. You offer a theory
of infinite multitudes, of other earths
almost like ours, of other lives almost like ours,
where maybe, in one, my child never swallows
too many pills, and in another we fail to develop
guns and bombs, and dodos still walk
across an island that could be Mauritius
while puffins dine on a plenitude of eels
in oceans that are not heating too fast.

I want to believe that all is not lost, that out there
is a lasting version of our world’s strange
and intricate forms, but I don’t. You say my belief
is immaterial to reality, and though no one is certain
whether our universe is infinite, singular, or just
one of many, I must accept that infinity is endless
and the duplications we imagine are plausible,
even probable, given all of space and time.
No, I say, these projections are no comfort.

We speed by a man beside the road, bent over,
clearing debris into a wheelbarrow. Wearing a flat cap,
brown trousers and a shirt of blue plaid, he’s small
of stature, like many of the elders in Portugal, 
undernourished as children in the time of Salazar.
Soon we pass another man, almost the same, wearing
a slightly different plaid, clearing the gutter.
How have I never noticed there’s someone here
on every road, cleaning up, bearing load after load?

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Heidi Beck grew up in a small town in New Hampshire. She emigrated to the UK in 1998 and now lives between Bristol, UK, and São Bras de Alportel in Portugal. She holds an MA in English Literature (University of Chicago) and an MA in Creative Writing (Bath Spa University). She has worked as a tour guide, data analyst and assistant zookeeper. Her poems have been published widely in journals, including Rialto, Magma, Poetry Ireland Review, The North, Butcher’s Dog, Finished Creatures, The Alchemy Spoon, and online at The Friday Poem. Her website is here.