Elizabeth Smither: Listening to Handel with a cat

Sometimes – and I think the cat thinks this –
after ordinary, quotidian things

lying stretched on the red tile floor
in the summer heat or reading in a chair

where there is nothing distracting or deep
for Handel seems conservative, even to a cat

music makes its own way, as water does, and swells
with sufficient volume between confining banks

which stalwartly resist – to the exact pitch
of water flow – until, and here the cat

stirs and his whiskers twitch – grandness comes
as if every drop resolves to go, magisterially

and slow and everything is resolve, resolve
and not a drop is wasted, not a vapour

above the darkening river, in the mist
but everything accrues to grand and majestic.

 
From The Red Shoes (2003). This could have been twee but instead takes on the grandeur of the music. The cat’s interaction becomes perfectly plausible (which doesn't always happen in the brief space of a poem).