Failure to Name

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.