When All Is Said And Done, Do You Do More? — Summary

Darrell GrayCheerful

A taste is emphasized in the past, and cannibals are emphasized in the future. We begin to segment our social explorations, like construction workers with boots that cramp their ankles. All visible defenses keep bumming off the invisible offense of Reality itself, while commerce grows dynamic near a spillway. Two-thirds of any action is composed of a prior action, like those cotton plugs in the necks of aspirin bottles. Levitation is the Central Rose.

Blocks impair variables, and interviews depend on a static gaseous state. Population is the only funnel. What comes out one end gets condensed and televised, while the raw violet urges bubble and seethe with facts. A lone interloper leans on the protean delta, a phonograph needle clenched firmly between his teeth. The baby cannibal plays a fugue. He is amused and in a random prediction. The anvil of priority is complex and foreshadowed--indeed, a whole cone of velocity is parting his hair, a micro-tornado eclipsing a larger sample.

The moon sticks to precise points of time. We know this from high school on. On and off. A president's lawn translates incoherent being, while a flag pole translates nothing. A crow may land there, off and on,--an "example." Opinion is feathery even at the core.

And so we drove all night, then stopped in solid shapes. Nuns were mutating starlight into delicate baskets. A rodeo hairnet fluttered with apperception. So long to the cannibals! A semaphore of human nature had better drive a small car!

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Darrell Gray's poem doesn't tell a story so much as throw one strange image after another at you, and the fun is in not being able to settle. Cannibals, aspirin bottles, a phonograph needle in someone's teeth, a baby playing a fugue: none of it adds up to a plot. Yet the sentences sound confident, like a lecture on sociology or science that has slipped its moorings.

Still, some themes seem to run underneath. The poem keeps poking at modern life, with its television, commerce, presidents, and opinions that are "feathery even at the core." The speaker seems amused and a little skeptical about how people explain the world to themselves.

The mood is playful, dreamlike, and slightly absurd. The last section, with its night drive and the cheerful "So long to the cannibals!", feels like escaping a puzzle without solving it. The poem asks you to enjoy the oddness rather than decode it.

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