hedonic adaptation

my tree-swing is set in time,
crystallized in that moment
where everything but the
sounds around me stop. Like
pausing life without muting it.
Set in the stone-skin of their
feathers, they chirp the birds.
Like statues gurgling avian
babble instead of water and
spray. the oscillation of my
tree-swing in their separate
moments is connected by an
absence of myself and that
of something camouflaged in
the frozen silence. Yet every-
time, the vacillation threatens
to break in the ecstasy of my
lightness or the tribulation of
my fall, I find myself in the
middle again. That incipient
second in the aftermath of winter.