Deborah Kohloss opens "Flat Description" by letting the air out of the most worn-out sentence in love: "I love you has been said before by somebody else." The line is not a declaration but a doubt about whether anyone can own a declaration. The speaker goes on to split language from voice ("I can speak in my own language without having my own voice"), and the rest of the poem circles that gap. How can you say something sincerely in words that everyone has already used? And how can you reach another person when your thoughts of them "do not produce" them?
The poem's answers are tentative, and they pivot on the word "community." It first appears after a strange claim: "The human animal recognizes her cry as her own and not her." A cry is involuntary, almost outside the self, yet it can still be recognized as yours. The poem then says flatly, "This is community." Later the same word returns as a question, "Is that community", after the speaker admits she takes "imagination for my own." Community here seems to mean a shared habit of mistaking borrowed things for personal ones, though the poem only suggests this.
Rooms carry most of the imagery. The speaker imagines "how rooms are occupied and what is left afterwards," and wonders whether the lovers' scent lingers once they have gone. Nobody can know, "first hand," because "we can't be where we aren't." The walls of a building "divide in and out," but only because "popular faith / keeps them standing", a nice image of boundaries held up by collective belief. Meanwhile "sheets, the air itself, can be exchanged," while "how I am remains in the room." Objects are replaceable, and the self is oddly stubborn. The room also holds the speaker's solitude, where "thoughts generated in the room alone are given over," and where she insists, "I am not alone. There is thought of you." Her conclusion, "I am half in and half out", describes both the walls and her own position between self and other.
The form matches that thinking. There is no rhyme and no regular meter. The sentences are short, declarative and often clipped, which suits a title like "Flat Description." Even the questions lose their question marks: "How much of my own voice is my own imagination." "How much do I want to love you. How much do I." Doubt arrives in the tone of a statement of fact. Repetition does the work that rhyme might do elsewhere, with "own," "room," "imagination" and "alone" returning until they start to feel unstable. "Own" in particular is hammered so often that ownership begins to sound like a fiction.
The flatness breaks in the last lines. The speaker pictures thought as "a heated winze / slowly dispersing the shrapnel", a winze being a small mining shaft, so thought becomes something dug out and under pressure, an explosion in slow motion. Then the poem swerves into deadpan absurdity: "Reptiles are the greatest thinkers. Schopenhauer was a crocodile. / Out in the fields the women carry octopi. / They strangle on each syllable." Cold-blooded reptiles suit an argument about thinking that is detached from feeling. The octopi, slippery and many-armed, read like words that can't be held, and the women choke on them. These images are best taken as the poem's suggestion, not a code, that speech is physical and costly.
The final line, "I want to be very quiet and talk on and on," resolves nothing, but it explains what the poem has been doing. Silence and speech are not opposites here. A quiet voice, a thought-voice or a written one, is the only way to keep talking to someone who isn't in the room.
That is what makes the poem worth reading. It treats a love poem's central problem, whether words can carry a real person, as a puzzle and not as a feeling to be inflated. It gets there through plain diction and rooms, sheets and walls, and its sudden strangeness lands harder because the surrounding tone is so level.