Kissing the Saints

You've kissed the marble cheeks of martyrs, 
the foot of God at least twice in your life
and afterward wiped the painted wound 
in the palm of his right hand with a hanky. 
You do as you're told, though you know 
the body on the bier off to one side 
of the nave isn’t a body but a plaster 
replica, more than a foot longer 
than actual human height and draped
with a loincloth of velvet. This is a time 
when people don’t carry little plastic bottles 
of hand sanitizer in their purses or seem to care 
very much about germs. Certainly, no one wears
face masks or has obsessive thoughts, hours 
after such encounters, even after learning 
that a single milliliter of saliva carries
anywhere from a hundred thousand to a million 
microbes. What do such shows of devotion 
give the faithful, besides unblinking belief 
that ritual works in a world where doggedness 
might be stronger than fate or faith? What happens, 
happens mostly because something else did— a prior 
cause. A switch flipped in the upper registers 
tips dominoes and marbles down and down and down. 
Shouldn't you have been rewarded by now for your 
endurance, for bending toward what kept asking 
for your love though it didn't think it necessary 
to answer back? Before public fountains shaped
like lions or country girls, you stop to watch 
water scatter gold-edged coins, and move on.