From the album songs
Adrianne Lenker writes a hymn about consumption. The song insists that life, memory and desire trade places as eater and eaten, and that trade is both tender and cruel.
Fragilely, gradually and surrounding The horse lies naked in the shed
Lenker softens the shock with gentle adverbs. The image makes decay intimate, like something entered into rather than explained.
The juice of dark cherries cover his chin The dog walks in and the crow lies in his jaw like lead
Fruit and animal corpses sit in the same register of tenderness and rot. The cherries read like blood and memory, and the crow as a heavy punctuation to the scene.
You are as far from me as memory Six years in, no baby
A private loss slides into the larger economy of eating and being eaten. Infertility becomes another way time consumes a person.
Ingydar bares a scar like a meteor Crystalline amber guilds her cheek
The named figure turns the poem inward and mythic at once. The scar reads as proof that hurt is cosmic and oddly beautiful, not separate from the natural order Lenker describes.
Everything eats and is eaten, time is fed
The line becomes a mantra and a decree. Its repetition makes acceptance feel ritual and gives the song its grim calm.
Lenker does not moralize. She catalogues appetite and loss until the two are indistinguishable. You leave with the image of cherries on skin and the line repeating in your head.