Darrell Gray's title is a trick question. "When all is said and done" normally announces that the talking is over, yet the poem that follows is almost nothing but saying. It is a block of confident assertions, and the title asks whether any doing ever comes out of all that talk. The ending offers an answer, though only after a good deal of strange scenery.
Rhyme and meter play no part here. This is a prose poem in four paragraphs, and its rhythm comes from the sentences themselves, which sound like a lecturer, a news anchor or a textbook. "Two-thirds of any action is composed of a prior action" has the cadence of a statistic and the shape of a logical proof, but it dissolves when you look at it closely. The simile that follows, "like those cotton plugs in the necks of aspirin bottles," is homely and exact, and it makes the claim feel solid for a moment. Gray repeats this move throughout: an abstract, authoritative statement, then a small physical object to prop it up. The sentences keep their grammatical poise while the sense slips away, and that gap between tone and meaning drives the whole poem.
The imagery falls into two camps. One is hard and mechanical: construction workers, a spillway, a funnel, a phonograph needle, an anvil, a "cone of velocity." The other is soft and organic: the "Central Rose," "raw violet urges," "feathery" opinion, starlight. The most revealing moment sets them side by side. "Population is the only funnel," Gray writes, and what comes out of it is "condensed and televised," while underneath, the urges "bubble and seethe with facts." Real life is messy and alive, and the media turns it into something compact and broadcastable. Even "Reality" gets a capital letter, as if it were another institution that visible defenses can only "bum off."
The cannibals are the poem's strangest recurring figure. A taste is "emphasized in the past," cannibals "in the future," as though appetite grows from preference into devouring. Later a "baby cannibal plays a fugue," an image that joins innocence, refinement and hunger. The poem never explains him, but one reading is that culture itself consumes, and that its most polished products come from that appetite. A similar mockery appears in the president's lawn, where a crow lands "off and on" as an "example." Gray puts the word in quotation marks, as if teasing the habit of pointing at one bird and calling it proof.
The last paragraph changes everything. After three paragraphs of lecturing, a human "we" appears and does something: "we drove all night, then stopped in solid shapes." After so many abstractions, "solid" feels like relief. The images that follow are gentler and odder: nuns "mutating starlight into delicate baskets," a "rodeo hairnet" fluttering "with apperception." These are acts of making, quiet and handmade, and they contrast with the broadcast world of the earlier paragraphs. Then comes the exclamatory farewell, "So long to the cannibals!", and the final joke: a "semaphore of human nature had better drive a small car!" Judging by the imagery, a semaphore is a system of flag signals, so human nature as a signalling device is asked to be modest and to take up less room. It echoes the earlier flag pole that "translates nothing."
The poem is worth reading because it imitates the sound of authority and then lets us see how little may be behind it. It does not argue that language is empty; it makes the emptiness funny and a little frightening, and then it drives away. If the title asks whether we do more, the closing movement says yes, though in a small way. The poem leaves the reader with a useful suspicion: when a sentence sounds certain, check what it actually says.