With pitch-perfect lyricism, Clark plucks resonant notes from the rituals of people living in the earliest of civilizations and connects them with the practices of individuals residing in the present time.  Readers travel “through time’s rooms” to explore the “pulse and thrum” of such universal experiences as joy, grief, and resilience guided by a poet who shares the stories of “people who shaped their bodies as songs to be sung” in harmony with the earth and “the endless above’s singing.”  Written in two parts, Solemnity Rites is a sonata celebrating the sacredness of daily life.

--Teresa Burns Murphy, author of The Secret to Flying

Gravity

It’s a surprise, every

time when I see a beetle

but it’s really a brittle, curled leaf;

a thin stick but it’s a dried worm,

a bit of bumpy rock but it’s a

tiny toad and I wonder

are the seasons simply

inhalations and exhalations,

the pupils of my eyes

black holes; am I pulled

forever in because                                                     

even gravity cannot escape?

Is it a flattened squirrel

or shred of tire in the road? 

Dung or a cicada casing?

Flower petals or tiny,

furry, white aphids, of a sort?

These ambiguities

shouldn’t surprise me--

after all, the solar system

is perhaps an atom

with its massive empty space

and small, orbiting particles--

like the sky and oceans of the earth

so vast and uninterrupted.

The carbon in my body

was formed in a star over

billions of years ago.

My organs or the earth’s: 

lungs or rainforests?

Isn’t it all the same?

I breathe out spring,

aware after all

that sometimes all of life is the same

to the gravity of our eyes.