Good news from a doctor should be the end of a story. In "Heart clinic" it is the start of a small identity crisis. The title puts us in a medical setting, but the poem never describes a waiting room or a diagnosis. It slips straight into the speaker's reaction, and that reaction is odd: "so good a heart / and happy I was / jealous of myself." A healthy heart has made him so happy that he envies the person who owns it. The self has split in two, one man observing and the other being observed, and the observer is a little resentful.
The phrase "good heart" does a lot of work. In a clinic it means a sound organ, but in everyday speech it means kindness and decency. The poem lets both meanings sit together without choosing, so we cannot quite tell whether the speaker is envying his health or his goodness. The inverted phrasing "happy I was" also has the ring of an old tale, as if this contentment belongs to a vanished past. The tense supports that. The happiness is already over by the time the second stanza arrives with its abrupt "but."
That turn is the poem's sharpest moment. "I serve my heart / in a sandwich" is funny and unsettling at once. The heart becomes lunch, something to be handed over, bitten into, used up. "Serve" also carries a second sense, as in serving a master or a cause, and the two meanings pull against each other. Is he devotedly serving his heart, or serving it up for someone else to eat? Either way, the result is "quite another man." The jealousy of the first stanza now makes sense. The man who had the good heart has become someone else, perhaps through careless living, perhaps through giving himself away too cheaply. The poem doesn't say, and that restraint keeps the tone light while the possible meaning gets heavier.
The final stanza moves from food to drink and from the physical to the spiritual: "holy water to drink / and change to moon- / shine my heart." The syntax is deliberately loose. It could be read as a wish for holy water to be transformed into moonshine, which echoes the miracle of water turned to wine, though here it is the harsher, homemade, illicit spirit. It could also be read as a plea to change the heart itself into moonshine. The pun on "spirit" lurks underneath, since holy water and strong liquor are both ways of seeking transformation. Moonshine also suggests moonlight, so the word can read as something dangerous, something beautiful, or both. By the end, the speaker seems to prefer an intoxicating, unreliable glow to the dull reassurance of a clean bill of health.
The construction mirrors this unsteadiness. The poem has three short stanzas of three lines each, with lines of roughly three to six syllables, and no rhyme or punctuation. Only the pronoun "I" is capitalised, which gives the voice a quiet, murmured quality, like a thought half-spoken. Instead of rhyme, repetition holds it together. "Heart" appears once in each stanza, closing the first and last, and the sounds of "heart," "happy" and "holy" echo one another with their breathy opening *h*. That sound links the three states the poem moves through: healthy, happy, sacred.
The line break in "moon- / shine" is the poem's most striking formal move. Splitting the word enacts the change the stanza describes, as if the word itself is being transformed mid-line. It also leaves "shine my heart" standing as the shortest line in the poem, which can be read as a command. Make the heart shine, even if the light is borrowed and unsteady.
The poem is significant because it manages so much in so few words. It treats the body as something both medical and moral, and it finds comedy in the gap between a good report and a lived life. It also resists a single answer. Is it a confession, a joke, a prayer, or a toast? The speaker is jealous of himself, and a reader may come away unsure which of his selves to trust. The poem seems to understand that a heart can be sound and still not be settled.