RD+CC

Our most recent task was a quite personal one, as we were just recently able to go back and visit the neighbourhood in which we met all those years ago in Switzerland. This poem is our adventures therein. Much like our completion of Audio Scattering, it contains bittersweet tones of the role of time in relationships, and a remembrance of the past. The poem is "Absence", by Elizabeth Jennings.

I visited the place where we last met.

Nothing was changed, the gardens were well tended,

the fountains sprayed their usual steady jet;

There was no sign that anything had ended

and nothing to instruct me to forget.

The thoughtless birds that shook out of the trees,

singing an ecstasy I could not share,

played cunning in my thoughts. Surely in these

pleasures there could not be a pain to bear

or any discord shake the level breeze.

It was because the place was just the same

that made your absence seem a savage force,

for under all the gentleness there came

an earthquake tremor: Fountain, birds and grass

were shaken by my thinking of your name.