For Samy

 Today I baked a pumpkin cheesecake 

With the round, orange fruit

Grown on the farm at my college 

(Or, in a complication, the college from which I just graduated)

(This poem is full of complications)

And I helped grow the pumpkin

I moved fertilizer and pulled weeds and I helped bring in the harvest

But so many other people helped grow the pumpkin

Planted it in soft dark earth

And weeded it

My friend Kate sings to the plants as she works and they always grow better

(From her I learned to sing to the fires I light

They burn better when I sing to them too)

And of course I didn't make the cream cheese

Or the butter

Or the gram crackers

The eggs were from my friend Rebekah 

Who knows the names of each of her sixty hens

So I mixed all the delicious things together in a bowl someone bought

And baked them in an oven that my dad's friend Tom installed in our house

And sang it the songs I learned from Kate as it baked

And in the end 

I had cheesecake.