loose fists, their heads together in

unconsciousness, they look like a small

royal bride and groom, the bride still a

head taller, married as children

in the Middle Ages, for purposes of state,

fighting all day, and finding their only

union in sleep, in the dark solitary

power of the dream—the dream of ruling the world.

A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sharon Olds was born in San Francisco and educated at Stanford University and Columbia University. She has been the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts grant and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, and her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, and The Nation. Her first book of poems, Satan Says, was published in 1980 and received the inaugural San Francisco Poetry Center Award. She lives in New York City. She was recently awarded the Walt Whitman Citation for Merit by the New York State Writers Institute of the State University of New York.