Doctor Frolic

By Robert Pinsky b. 1940 Robert Pinsky

Felicity the healer isn’t young

And you don’t look him up unless you need him.

Clown’s eyes, Pope’s nose, a mouth for dirty stories,

He made his bundle in the Great Depression

And now, a jovial immigrant success

In baggy pinstripes, he winks and wheezes gossip,

Village stories that could lift your hair

Or lance a boil; the small town dirt, the dope,

The fishy deals and incestuous combinations,

The husband and the wife of his wife’s brother,

The hospital contract, the certificate ...

A realist and hardy omnivore,

He strolls the jetties when the month is right

With a knife and lemons in his pocket, after

Live mussels from among the smelly rocks,

Preventative of impotence and goitre.

And as though the sight of tissue healing crooked

Pleased him, like the ocean’s vaginal taste,

He’ll stitch your thumb up so it shows for life.

And where he once was the only quack in town

We all have heard his half-lame joke, the one

About the operation that succeeded,

The tangy line that keeps that clever eye

So merry in the punchinello face.

Source: The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems 1966-1996 (Princeton University Press, 1996)

Biography

Robert Pinsky is one of America’s foremost poet-critics. Often called the last of the “civic” or public poets, Pinsky’s criticism and verse reflect his concern for a contemporary poetic diction that nonetheless speaks of a wider experience. Elected Poet Laureate of the United States in 1997, his tenure was marked by ambitious efforts to prove the power of poetry—not just as an intellectual pursuit in the ivory tower, but as a . . .

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