This was once a storehouse, where I kept my poems so that I should not forget them. It has reopened as a menagerie, which is a grander word for very nearly the same thing: a place to keep the creatures of one mind from wandering off and being lost.

There are three wings. In the Enclosures live the things with a pulse — an ongoing story, told a morning at a time, drawn rather closely from a life that is mostly my own. The Terraces are open to the night air, and hold whatever I happen to think after dark and am unwise enough to write down. The Salons are kept indoors and well lit, and there I hang the poems once they will stand still long enough to be framed.

The keeper prefers to remain a little anonymous, as keepers tend to. He is not hiding, exactly; he simply finds it easier to show you the animals than to stand in front of them. If something here makes you smile, you are welcome to say so — it is the only admission the place charges, and it is what tells the keeper which of his creatures are worth feeding.