Seven short lines, no punctuation, no capital letters, and a title that holds back the poem's one big word until the reader is about to start. "Drought" names a spell of dry weather, but the poem spends most of its time inside a head. The speaker looks at a clock, feels a fear with no object, and finds his mind has gone blank, "while my yard / is drying up." The central idea is that emptiness can be inner and outer at once, and that each version seems to reflect the other. A parched garden becomes a picture of a parched mind.
The opening is a strange definition: "fear is the nothing / I face in a clock." Fear usually has an object, such as a dog, an exam, or a diagnosis. Here it is simply a nothing, an absence. The verb "face" works twice, since the speaker confronts the nothing and a clock also has a face. The preposition matters too. He faces the nothing "in" a clock, not "on" it, as if he were staring down into the dial rather than reading the time. A clock measures time passing, so the fear may be that time is passing and nothing is happening inside it. That is an inference, but the rest of the poem supports it.
The second stanza turns that fear into something practical: "after looking at it / I cannot get anything / to take place in my mind." The idiom "take place" means "happen," but it also holds the word "place," so the mind becomes a room or stage where events should occur and none will. The plain wording makes the admission feel real, like someone confessing he can't get started on anything. The poem never says what the speaker is trying to think or write, and that blankness is part of the effect. Judging by the imagery, it could be a creative block, though the text doesn't say so. Notice also that "nothing" in the first line comes back as "anything" in the fourth, now inside a negative. The emptiness has spread from the clock into the speaker.
The last stanza opens with "while," which can mean "at the same time" or "whereas." Both fit. While the speaker is frozen, the outside world carries on, and the yard is the only thing in the poem where anything does take place. What happens there is loss. The possessive "my" suggests responsibility, since this is his patch of ground, yet he is shown only watching. "Drying up" is also a phrase we use for a writer running out of ideas or a source running out of water, so the literal and figurative meanings sit in the same two words. The poem ends on "up" with no full stop, in the continuous tense, so the drying is still going on when the poem stops.
The form quietly supports all this. There is no rhyme and no steady metre, but the line lengths are telling. The first two lines run to about five syllables, the next three to six, and then the poem shrinks to three syllables ("while my yard") and four ("is drying up"). It thins out the way the yard does. The sounds are careful too. "Nothing," "looking," "anything" and "drying" all end in the same soft *-ing*, which gives the poem a drifting, unfinished feel. The long *i* of "I," "mind," "while," "my" and "drying" rings through the closing lines and ties the mind to the yard. The hard *k* in "clock," "cannot" and "take" may even give a faint tick, as if the clock had followed the speaker into the sentence.
The poem's significance lies in how little it needs. It has no simile and never says "my mind is like my yard." It simply puts the two side by side and lets "while" connect them. The title does the naming, the line breaks do the pacing, and a handful of everyday words ("face," "take place," "drying up") carry double meanings. For a poem about nothing happening in the mind, it gets a great deal done in under thirty words, and it shows how much feeling a poem can hold when it trusts the reader to fill in the gaps.