Between Transmutation and Regeneration

Jonathan was walking down 8th Street, fingering the hole on his pocket, when it occurred to him that there might have been only one child in the poem. The line read “Once there was a child…” Perhaps there was only a single child who was reborn every morning in time to step out of the garden and become a rock or a shell or a tree all over again. What happened, he wondered, in that period between regeneration and transmutation, in that tiny window of time in which the pine tree that had been a child-as-a-tree the day before, was just a pine tree again, a pine tree waiting to become a pine tree-that-was-once-a-child, but was always a tree? It made him dizzy to think about.
-from Every Object