The Rock Breathes

The rock breathes:
black basalt, sparkling granite,
the dark grey of newly-cloven slate;
it breathes, it lives,
it is the earth.
I would know its secrets,
to be absorbed into the schist,
my molecules sliding through its,
until our very atoms vibrate at a frequency
and we know not where it begins
and I end.
We are the rock.
We feel the veins of quartz,
brilliant in the morning sun,
rivulets of gold leaking through our cracks,
the steady drip of calcium-rich seep water
growing teeth in our hollow secret places.
If I were the rock,
I would breathe in one century,
out the next,
and I would live
forever.