LS: There's a particular piece of yours that stood out for me amongst many strong poems or a section, actually, entitled, "I Sing a Doubled Song." I wondered if you could comment on that. It begins with an epigraph, yes?

PC: It's the longest section in the book. It weaves together quite a few things. The epigraph is from Shmuel HaNagid, the eleventh-century Hebrew poet I translated. The title of the section is "I Sing a Doubled Song," and the epigraph reads:

"I SING A DOUBLED SONG
...to the Lord
for the double miracle he wrought."

HaNagid was the Jewish leader of the Muslim army in Granada, and he was also the prime minister of the Muslim state of Granada. In this epigraph he is writing about a battle in which he led a Muslim army to victory over a rival state in southern Spain. He's celebrating that victory. My poem, “I Sing a Doubled Song,” is about an event that most people will remember. In February, 1994, a Brooklyn-born Jewish doctor named Baruch Goldstein went into what's called The Cave of the Patriarchs in the West Bank city of Hebron, and opened fire in a mosque, killing 29 people and wounding some sixty. Then he was turned on by the worshipers and killed there. The poem is about this massacre. What's doubled about it? Everything: the event itself involves a compounded and uncanny conjunction of events, and in a cave whose Hebrew name, Machpelah, comes from a root meaning "doubled," or "folded." The cave is the burial site of the patriarchs of the great monotheistic religions, so Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and Leah, are all buried there, as legend has it, and the cave is divided in half: one side is a synagogue for Jewish worshipers and the other is a mosque for Muslim worshipers. On the day that the massacre occurred there was a conjunction of two holidays--one Muslim and one Jewish. The Jewish holiday was the holiday of Purim, which commemorates the saving of the ancient Persian Jewish community. The villain in this story had designs to wipe out the entire Jewish community, but the community was saved by Esther, a Jew, who cunningly becomes the queen and managed to expose the villain and foil his plans. This holiday is celebrated by dressing up in costumes of various sorts--it's a kind of Jewish Halloween--and Jews are commanded to drink wine to get sufficiently drunk so that they can't tell the difference between the hero and the villain in the story. Often comic or satirical plays are put on commemorating the story. That's on the Jewish side. On the Muslim side, it happened to be the month of Ramadan, which commemorates the revelation of the Quran, and on that particular Friday, when the massacre took place, the mosque was full because the Sura, the chapter of the Quran that was going to be read that day, was extremely popular. So people came to hear the recitation. In short, this poem weaves together sections of that Sura, of that chapter that the Muslims had come to hear, parts of the Purim story, and the psalms that were being recited on the Jewish side of the synagogue just as the slaughter took place. It's a painfully ironic take on HaNagid's celebration of the double miracle of his 11th -century victory. I was fairly obsessed by the judicial commission after this massacre, which was broadcast live on TV and on the radio, and some of the things they said were just hair-raising. Would you like me to read that poem?

LS: Yes, please do.

PC: The basic structure, or the model, is one of the psalms, the longer psalms at the end of the book of psalms.

XVII. “I SING A DOUBLED SONG

                            … to the Lord
             for the double miracle he wrought.”
                                 —Shmuel HaNagid, c. 1053, Granada

 
For the Chief Physician
     Through the Explosion
of Belief in the Cave of the Fathers;

This is what the faithful heard
     before the rounds and slaughter,
or hoped to hear in part
     when a stranger opened fire
in the floating lunar month of months
     marking the Book's revelation—
on a festival day of vengeance exchanged
     for vengeance excused,
of fasting and masks and reversal
     and wine upthroughunknowing
one's hangman from redeemer.

This is what the faithful heard
     before the issuant fire
at the Cave of What Is Doubled,
     Machpelah, from cephel,
     or Fold, as in double or couple;
this is the cave where the peoples'
     couples were laid to rest,
the tomb of the Fathers and Mothers,
     of a man who rode in a land of promise
with sorrow before him and his son at his side,
     and bound him there in belief
     before a knife and hill

then set him free to drift
     within his name,
like mercury. This is the ghosted
double cross of faith's deep grief,
of living near the drain of the altar
where slaughter in the Name
     of the One Lord--
in unknown sound and permutation--
was slaughtered in the Name of the One
Lord,
this is what the faithful
     heard before the fire:

But as for the godless who grossly sin,
     their refuge shall be the Fire;
     as often as they desire
     to come forth from it so
shall they be restored into it. And unto them
it shall be said: Taste the fire's torment,
     with which you've dealt as lies . . .
     We gave the book to Moses
     so let there be no doubt
     concerning the encounter with him.
We set it up as a guidance for the Children
of Israel; is it not a guidance for them?

This in part is what the
faithful heard across their prayer,
kneeling or ear to the wall or air
     reciting Psalms
     or the Book of Surrender
to the sound of the opening fire,
an extinguisher struck and exploding
before the ritual came to an end,
     a witness stated
before the judicial commission
before the Chief Physician

who fired was beaten and torn
like an offered bird
     for the offering of peace
at the door to the Tent of Meeting;
And the priests shall dab to the blood
     against the altar round about
     in an offering made by fire
of a sweet savor unto the Lord.
. . . This is the literal word
     raised to the power
     of disbelief
in the blessing beyond the eye,

in the almond budding
beyond the Holy One Blessed Be He's
     parcel of land.
This is more
than your average Lord can stand.
If I were hungry, He says,
     in the Psalmist's song
     to Asaph, number fifty
     (“Out of Sion,
the Perfection of Beauty,
God hath shined forth... A fire

devoureth before him...”)
     : If I were hungry,
     I would not tell thee...
This is what the faithful heard
Before the doctor opened fire.

LS: Such a powerful piece especially in the knowledge of the matters you described to us at the beginning of the poem. I do want to mention that that section, section XVII, is part of a larger composition in the first part of the book, “Speech's Hedge.” The title certainly calls to mind the comment you made about trying to take all of the levels of language, from speech which directly communicates to the poetic that borders on music, which is expressive but not communicative in the same way. I think this poem really does have that kind of range. We thank you for it.

PC: Thank you.

LS: Peter, it's been great. We have to keep talking like this.

 

 

Transcribed from the radio interview by Angela Buck

 

 

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