Cats (and Mountains)

This poem is to celebrate the first comment on this blog. The connexion between the poem and the comment is loose, but perceptible.

A cat is always a cat.
Every moment a pose,
Every movement its own,
Lithe, clean, unclothed.

A cat is always alone.
It is unbothered by this.
It is its own centre,
Unclaimed and comfortably lost,

So there is a stillness
Peculiar to cats: a steady,
A steadying sway,
That starts in their eyes.

There is a kind of silence, too,
Unique in a cat. It does not
Make noise, but brings out
The noises in other things,

And he wanders through
Wanders round and through,
Through a room, unstilling things,
A patch of wandering gravity.

He does not speak. His mouth,
His inside-out triangle,
Is closed. His tail moves.
It moves slowly, making strange smiles.