Brick without Cover

A house can be quiet without feeling peaceful. Chairs remain exactly where they were last placed. Doors close completely. Nothing seems out of place.

Brick without Cover begins with nothing visibly amiss. Joy arrives in restrained gestures. Some things are said aloud, while others remain suspended, understood without ever being voiced.

Eventually, there may be another space, one less meticulous about what is allowed to be seen. Moving between these environments reshapes how a person learns to inhabit them, holding on to what was once necessary while discovering what is now possible. This reflection comes out of that movement, shaped by what is kept intact and what is no longer concealed.

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Brick without Cover

(a poem)

By Kerry Ann Wiley

Black and white—
the childhood house remains still,
windows hushed behind shuttered eyes,
light trimmed into obedient squares
that learned early
how to vanish without disruption.

There was joy there,
of a kind—
tidied, timed,
set beside necessary fictions:
we are fine,
this is how it’s done,
look away.

The house was built to contain.
Its walls received sound without echo,
held shape around each omission.

Now—another house,
washed in half-light and bone-colored truth.
Brick without cover.
Trees gather nearby,
not to shield, but to witness—
their rings not a measure of time,
but of what was finally allowed.

This house forgets to lock its doors.
Light comes in uninvited.
The shadows still attend,
given names,
offered chairs.

Not one house,
but a shape held between them—
unfinished,
part shadow,
part light left on too long.
Neither whole alone,
but together, a kind of home.

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What remains is not a single place, but the space that opens between what was once held back and what can now come through.

What came first does not disappear, nor does what followed take its place. Each leaves its trace. The poem ends by holding both at once, allowing what was shaped by restraint to exist alongside what no longer needs to be hidden.

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