The speaker is thinking about how poorly language carries what we feel. The opening lines treat words as raw thought, even as a kind of desire, but the images quickly turn bleaker: thoughts "drown" trying to escape through the mouth, and the words that come out are "inert, lifeless objects." Words, in this view, are only a means of getting across something else.
That something else is what the speaker wants to believe: that feeling matters beyond our limited, everyday context, and that we can be at peace with a silence that "speaks from beyond the symbol." The poem then narrows to one small, physical moment, fingers moving from a cheek to a collarbone, with no speaking at all. The closing line, trailing off in ellipsis, is hopeful but uncertain. The mood is tender and quietly vulnerable, a longing to be understood without having to explain.