"The Commercial Traveller's Wife" is a poem by Australian poet Ronald McCuaig.
A neglected older woman makes a pass at the young man boarder with her and her husband.
She is rejected and the young man then realises that he will have to move out and find another place to live.
In his commentary on the poem in 60 Classic Australian Poems Geoff Page praised the poet's " mastery of the colloquial", putting the opinion that McCuaig "was perhaps the first urban poet to use language in this way".
He goes on to comment that this is a poem about the "everyday – and the shoddy moral compromises made by people who are fully human but have no particular claim to fame.