Alan Dugan: Another Cat Poem: A Cat Is Not A Dancer But A Hunter

The cat on its hind legs
taking a swipe at a mocking bird
was in a serious dance
but a stand-off dance
with the bird because
the cat didn't catch
the bird with its claws
and the bird didn't beak
the cat with its beak:
it just amused us,

but later the cat won some
other encounter. The words
"serious" and "dance" did not apply.
It came back to us wing-mouthed,
(the wings of a fledgling
coming out of both sides
of its mouth, the bird
a bloody fluff in its teeth)
expecting our congratulations,
expecting us to say Good hunting,
Dancer, dancer, oh you dancer.


From Poems Seven (New poems) (2001). Which contains two poems with titles beginning "Another Cat Poem", but I don't know whether the anothers refer to a previous cat poem by Dugan or to the fact that the general corpus of cat poems is, well, extensive.