Switch off the lights and see what is left. In Marianne Baskin's "Black Out", the answer is a single sense. Nothing in the poem is seen and everything is heard: ticking, roaring, pouring, buzzing, humming. The title could point to a power cut in a storm, or to a more personal blackout such as sleeplessness, panic or fainting. The poem never settles which, and it doesn't need to. Its central idea is that when sight is taken away, time becomes audible, and the mind struggles to keep order among the noises.
The opening stanza shows how the sounds blur together. "Roaring sound ticks / thru the clock loud / thunder cloud" has no clear grammar to say what is doing the roaring. It might be the clock or the storm, and the words slide between them. The chiming "loud" and "cloud" tie the two together. By the third stanza the noise has moved indoors and into the body: "head roars / rain pours". The roar belongs first to the weather, then to the speaker's skull, and the rhyme makes the transfer feel almost inevitable. Then come "buzz buzz" and "drops hum", the sounds of insects or electrical appliances. They are odd in a dark house, and the poem may be suggesting that the ears keep humming after the real noise has stopped.
The only human figure appears halfway through: "woman / sets things / right time by / clocks / locks the / hours tight- / ly wound / up words". Judging by the context, she could be resetting clocks after the power returns, or the speaker could be watching herself do it. The sounds here click like a mechanism: "right" and "tight", "clocks" and "locks". "Wound up" works twice, describing a spring tightened in a clock and a person tightened with nerves. The final word, "words", is the cleverest, because the poem's own language is also wound up. Her effort to lock the hours in place sounds tense and brittle, not calm.
The form makes the reader share this tension. Nearly every line is only two to four words long, so the poem ticks down the page. There is no punctuation at all until the very last mark. Without commas or full stops, nothing lets the sound pause. The line breaks cut words open, as in "under- / neath" and "tight- / ly", so the reader hesitates inside a word like a clock catching between beats. Stanza breaks also split phrases ("bed my / head roars"), so each rest turns out to be false and sends you straight into the next line.
The poem's grammar finally breaks down in the closing stanzas: "the time is hear the / ticks buzz / thru the / tears the / drops fall". "Hear" sits where we expect "here", and the two words collide. Being in the present moment and listening to it become the same thing. "Tears" can be a noun or a verb, so the line can be read as crying or as ripping, and the drops that "fall fall fall" sound like both rain and tears. Then comes "leaves", which can mean autumn leaves falling or something departing. Both readings work, and the triple "fall" slows the rhythm like heavy drops landing one at a time.
The last stanza is the most striking: "seconds / between / the sound." Here the full stop finally arrives. After all the clamour and winding and locking, the speaker no longer listens to the ticks but to the gaps between them. That is a sharp reversal. We normally measure time by the sound a clock makes, but the poem ends by noticing the silence that makes the sound possible.
That is what makes "Black Out" worth reading. It doesn't describe a frightening night so much as put the reader inside one, using fragmented words, mixed-up sounds and a missing full stop. A few dozen small words are enough to show that when the lights go out, time stops being an abstract idea and becomes something you can hear.