Failure to Name

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I reach for a word
and find only the space
where the word should be,
an absence shaped
like a question
I have asked all my life.
What I feel is immense,
yet the sentence I make
shrinks it to something
manageable,
something ordinary.
Perhaps this is why
we are so often disappointed
with ourselves:
we mistake the uttered
for the real.
Still, I speak,
not because language suffices
but because silence
is its own cruelty.
I speak,
knowing the truth
will remain outside the poem,
patient, unyielding,
but whole.