fingers

[fflo]

i keep seeing those fingers, hovering over those pages
those everyday spiral-bound casual pages
sharp-cornered, thin line-ruled pages you might use
for notes to the cat sitter, or grocery needs

those fingers, held still but not resting:  suspended
beside the handwritten black marks of the words
at the table where nothing like this'd ever happened
'til us, in the room on this night for this thing

a voice that belies just as much as the pages,
near calm, nearly even, like the eyes that look down to
move steady and slow over lines on the pages of
stunned anguish, emptiness, "no"

the tiniest twitches— are they in the fingers,
the voice and the eyelids? or are they in me?
so strange, the perception of how these perceptions
of small words on pages she quietly reads

i've never seen anything quite like those fingers
apparently fingers can do this to me