FLOATING

We're about five days from our departure for Seoul, and I'm floating over a restless sea of tasks, some for travel, some for maintenance, some just to get us through these next few days. This adventure was unexpected. While I was in Tasmania Peter was offered the chance to teach a summer course at Sookmyung Women's University, and said yes. Then he invited me to travel with him. We'll have a month in Seoul, then fly to Japan in early July, and spend 10 days visiting Kyoto and Tokyo. Then I'll fly to Victoria to visit my aunt, and Peter will come home to Toronto.

Peter will be busy teaching for three weeks in Seoul and who knows what I'll be doing -- Will I be brave enough to wander out into that enormous city? Someone told me there are 14 million people there!

In the meantime I'm piling up clothes on the bed, choosing books to read on the plane, deciding what poetry I want for company throughout the trip, and wondering how we'll do, living in a small room with a fridge but no stove. We're used to a large house where we each have our preferred corners, and neither of us likes it much when we find ourselves stumbling over each other in the kitchen.

Of course life where one lives keeps on going, even when you're planning to leave much of it behind for awhile. Tonight we're going to hear the 7 poets nominated for the Griffin Poetry Prize, always a highlight of the year for both of us. And we each seem to have people to have lunch or coffee with, things to deliver or pick up, ballets or baseball games to attend, before that 8:30 a.m. flight.

But I have to get to Open Air Books before that reading, and see if I can unearth a copy of Mark Brazil's Birds of East Asia, a new birdbook for the region published last year by Princeton University Press.It's time to settle instead of float, get lunch, head out.