Prayer in the Time of COVID

I invite a friend to dinner: roasted cauliflower,
chickpeas and kale. We eat outdoors, six feet
apart. She is too thin; tomorrow
she will start radiation. They will tattoo
markers across her breasts—
a constellation permanent as the Pleiades.
She tells me how, one Thanksgiving, her son
made a salad of kale he massaged in the kitchen,
kneaded to tenderness. The power of touch,
she says. I say I have not been touched
since March—not a brush of skin, bumped
elbow, side-by-side thigh. All week
there has been a giant silk moth
laying eggs on the screen door in back,
so near I could have stroked her wings. I think
of the hands that create a radiologist’s map,
that break down the veined leaves of the greens
or worship the unblinking eyes imprinted
on wings. God of the haloed virus that brings us
to this, read our upturned palms—each fingerprint
so singular; each so holy and so strange.