The speaker is confessing to a strange crime: touching something that wasn't theirs. They didn't want it and handed it back, yet the punishment was losing their fingers. From there the poem turns the fingers into separate beings, "ten thin fates," as innocent as fire looking for fuel. The speaker, imagining themselves as the oxygen feeding that fire, couldn't bring themselves to let it die.
What follows is a kind of rampage. The fingers break windows, enter bodies "aorta by aorta," and behave like a virus attacking the body's defenses. The speaker took all this for joy, but the ending shows the cost: the fingers writhe, shudder and turn to ash.
The mood is feverish and guilty, with a thrill that curdles into regret. The poem seems to suggest how easily desire or curiosity can grow past our control, though it never says exactly what the "touching" was. That mystery is part of its unsettling pull.