sleepy sibilance

I slipped my hand
over the curves of your body,
listening to the sibilant hiss
my hand’s loving you resounded

and I thought it sounded the way it must
to slip a handwritten secret
under the bedroom door
of the man you love
but are afraid to (and that’s the secret)

or the way rain sounds
when it competes
with speeding tires
tracing the shadowy signature
of highways that slither through landscapes
in a kind of forgery we all fall for,
because it only seems fitting
for raindrops to make exit ramps
to new starts that much more slippery.

My hand took the right turns;
those cars took the wrong ones—
but I suppose we all ended up
under a different set of comforters,
only I didn’t have to visit
a home improvement store
to be afforded this luxury
of loving someone from under them,

thinking about whispered secrets
that were so obvious
from the place I uttered them
while the rest of you think about stapled receipts
from the malls that sputtered them.

And I can wake up and do it again,
whether or not it’s raining.