The speaker asks to be "let down" gently, one cat at a time, and then lists a series of cats that seem to stand for different sides of a life: the cat that wakes you rudely, the one that ignores you, the one that causes small messes. Read quickly, it's a funny, affectionate portrait of living with pets. But the list slowly darkens. A once-magical cat has gone lazy and fat, another kills birds out of irritation, and the last one vanishes mid-sentence.
That final image is the poem's turn. The vanishing is compared to a body thrown from a bridge, while the soul keeps going, "oblivious," and yowls at the hunter's moon. The poem suggests these cats might also be moods, selves, or stages of the speaker's own life, and that loss can happen suddenly while something in us carries on complaining. The mood is wry, tender, and a little eerie, with grief tucked inside the humor.