Thought That Nature. Trey Moody

of language. Just listen:

      Land absorbs sound, deflects some. Traffic tries too hard, neglecting sun’s sheets, meaning grief. I’d say belief is altogether wrong, but I’d be alone—for one, ground soon becomes softer than first thought, less than seconds after.

      He will go on in the next line to rhyme that “after” with “disaster,” in an instance of his continual, delicate application of his theme. But it’s above all sound that’s leading here, and it’s sound that fosters intricate and telling connections, such as that among “sheets,” “grief,” and “belief,” all orbiting obliquely around the first syllable of “meaning.” Other links hold “sun,” “wrong,” “alone,” and “one” together in a constellation created by tight sequences that create a commentary that both runs parallel to and deviates from the trajectory of the whole.

      Though ostensibly prose, the tight interweave of sound binds the text into a single, seamless gesture that is distinctly poetic in its ability to disrupt linguistic clarity, that supposedly ideal one-to-one relationship between sign and referent, in ways that offer additional relationships, and thus additional dimensions of sensation and possibility. It’s these tangled threads of potential that Moody chases through his acute attention. And this attention is always focused on the actual, the incidental, the mundane.

      His relentless interest in the weather is, in part, a way of insisting upon the integrity of the daily, and just as he constructs constellations of sounds, he also creates constellations of the common objects of the world (tree, statue, grass, house, fog), letting them become, on the one hand, emblems of both the specific and the generic, and on the other, recurring occasions for flights of speculation, in which chains of association lead him forth.