Hannah, traveller, floating haze, who sits confined by walls of stone, what beckons you up from your corner of dark? What bears you aloft over where Mumler dreams behind dark sails of falling hair, the tips of which tickle, just so, Mumler’s mouth as he mutters in somnolent, flippant despair? And when you orbit William Guay, lying as stiff as a dressmaker’s doll, will you shadow him, Hannah, and dry his wet cheeks? And leaving the cell-block, the jailhouse entire, while to cycle the slumbering earth at your ease and to see Fanny Conant in rooms not her own under mandate that no woman born can appease, until you detach from the ledge of her toes and into the evening beyond where she sleeps, like a shorn figurehead sailing over the earth, the wreck of your ecstasies lost to the deeps? See the governess, loping and blue in the face, and the man in the church with the kelp in his hair, and the grande dame ensconced in her yellowing gown, bent composing a letter that no one will read, and the bludgeoned photographer, pressed under glass, and the drowned girl, the darling, unseeming, at sea? Oh how fair is this wasteland that keeps us no more? Oh how boundless this charnel house, choked with our hopes? Until Hannah’s eyes in their fortitude close, and the clouds part before her, and downward she soars?