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Little Wife

By Marianne Boruch b. 1950 Marianne Boruch

At the Oriental Institute, Chicago

They redid King Tut splendid,

once stone-huge as this

yet his wife’s feet

tiny, the only thing of her now

low, next to him. A few toes, some of the rest,

a bit of ankle, that’s it

in the shade of her husband’s looming, massive

looking straight ahead into the future

where we live and can’t

eye-to-eye, where to stare at him

is to suffer warbler neck, head back and up

à la the high just-leafing-out trees as bright bits

wing their blink

and hide. Little wife,

such small feet, the thought

dwarfs the king

as ache, as what is

ever left of us

and oh, I like her better.

Source: Poetry (November 2011).

Biography

Poet and essayist Marianne Boruch grew up in Chicago. She is the author of seven collections of poetry, including, most recently, The Book of Hours (2011); Grace, Fallen from (2008); and Poems: New & Selected (2004). Her memoir, The Glimpse Traveler (2011), concerns a hitchhiking trip she took in 1971. In the Blue Pharmacy (2005) and Poetry’s Old Air (1995) are collections of her prose on poetry. In an interview with Brooke . . .

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