Adam Waking

By Katie Peterson b. 1974 Katie Peterson

We chose this animal to be our pet.

His indifference allowed us to sleep.

Cat, who made your ears bend back,

who made you lazy as quick?

Who made you work?

It is a wonder any sun is left.

Still it is always so abrupt.

Sleep like an umbrella going up,

clumsy like a broken umbrella coming down,

this waking, and into what?

I did not ask to be afraid.

I did not ask for pleasure, but there it was,

it exfoliated at its own leisure,

grew until it was all that was—

The brief interruption of who I am

interrupts and punctuates the day

I always assumed that I would share—

Cat who cut the sun down from the sky

and then responsible put it up again?

There must be one of us that you prefer.

Katie Peterson, “Adam Waking” from This One Tree, published in 2006 by New Issues/Western Michigan University.

Source: This One Tree (New Issues Press, 2006)

Biography

Born in Menlo Park, California, poet Katie Peterson earned a BA at Stanford University and a PhD at Harvard University, where her dissertation, “Supposed Person: Emily Dickinson and the Selflessness of Poetry,” won the Howard Mumford Jones Prize.

Peterson’s lyric poems explore interior and exterior landscapes, exposure, and shelter. “A poem is a place,” Peterson stated in an interview with the Harvard Gazette. “It does not . . .

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