If My Words Were In My Hands And Not My Mouth

I.
If my words were in my hands and not my mouth,
If my sentences were framed by hand,
If agile fingers were my eloquence,
How would I whisper secrets in the shushing darkness?
How could you hear me on the moonless nights?

II.
If my words were in my hands and not my mouth,
And it was eyes that hung on every word,
Would flirtation be a tango for four hands?
Would anger
Jazz and swash like Martha Graham?
Would fingers knot and tangle in frustration?
Would praise unfold like flowers?
Would joy arise like a lark in the clear air?
Would being incommunicado involve rope and blindfolds?
Would girl talk
Swirl and flutter through the fingers like a restless flock of sparrows that
Without warning
Burst into a flight of giggles?
Could I talk to myself without a mirror?

III.
Oh,
If my words were in my hands and not my mouth,
. . . And I were not so palsied with self-consciousness . . .
I would let my hands dance out my heart.
But, oh,
I would have to say it to your face.
And, oh,
Whenever you are looking at me,
I am suddenly all awkwardness and elbows.
Your gaze tongue-ties my hands,
And my words come out all thumbs.
My shyness puts my speech in mittens
When what I want to do most
Is let my fingertips
Whisper soft “I love you’s” on your cheeks
Over and over.

 

I woke up in the middle of the night last night, decided to read for a while, was well into His Majesty's Dragon by Naomi Novik (which is shaping up to be a really good read, BTW), when I suddenly had a squirrel moment and my little magpie mind went ricocheting off of oooh-shiny into a mental tangent about sign language and people having to talk with their hands, and how that would play out in language and imagery. I was reading on my tablet, which has a WordPress app on it, so I stopped and wrote a small stone about it because they were interesting thoughts and I wanted to put them someplace where I could find them again.  Because you can't insert images on that jive (8),"medium-slow*" Android WordPress app, I had to go back today on my desktop PC and put the stone image in, and of course re-read it now that it was good and cold, and give it a tweak or two, and snatch a copy off it like a new toy and run outside and play with it on this blog. . . 


* half-fast