The Iowa Review
Volume 10
Issue 2 Spring
1979
Salad and Simile: A Defense of Cultivation
Sydney Lea
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Recommended Citation
Lea, Sydney. "Salad and Simile: A Defense of Cultivation." The Iowa Review 10.2 (1979): 87-88. Web.
Available at: http://ir.uiowa.edu/iowareview/vol10/iss2/15
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Article 15
Salad and Simile: A Defense
Sydney Lea
Before you, spinach green as lucre.
You dream of opportunity?perhaps
of Cultivation
a lucky
letter.
But hearts of iceberg lettuce yellow
like junk mail. Disappointment
in early June, a season
of legumes, new roots and leaves.
Time will pass: the fern of the asparagus
turn to feathers, as for sweeping woe like dust
that
settles,
Your mind
re-arrangement.
needing
has wandered
from
the bowl
from his burrow
like awoodchuck
to devour odd weeds.
Sitting, my Candide,
conning greens like tea-dregs,
you conjure bleak perspectives.
a possible
conversely,
beneficence?
though,
You
what
you
But why
are what
eat
not
you eat:
is you?
the pear tomato centers in the dish
not like a jaundiced hope but like the sun
for months
you wished
ago when deep ice sealed
the ever-anxious
tubers (parsnip, rutabaga, turnip)
and the cover crop of vetch. "Good salads may be prologues
to bad suppers": so a proverb has it. Thus your salad
was
a simile before it grew. Why not toss it?
these bitter herbs and shoots you chew
Assume
87
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augur
Begin
opportunity,
again. Your
a break.
Fame.
fiddle-faddle
Romance.
with
a wooden
Money.
fork,
to your
like a wizard's gig, may turn up something
construe.
and
the
Let it be fresh
you
crisp,
meaning
88
taste.