TAKAKO ARAI

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When the Moon Rises

It is the night shift in an abandoned spinning

factory

There is only a single light bulb here

The spools of thread turn by themselves

Click goes the bobbins

Changed by the machines

It has already been a decade

Since this place shut down

But when the moon rises, it begins to work

Its strange automation

They say soon after the war

A factory worker’s hair got tangled

In the machines, killing her

There are things that float here

But this is not the work of ghosts

No

In the factory

There are peculiar habits

That is what I mean

Peculiar habits remain here

An old lady who spun thread

For forty-four years here

Still licks her index finger and twists

Even on her deathbed

She cannot escape that gesture

That must be true in the netherworld too

Since threads are so infinitely thin

The gestures sink into the bodies

Of those who manipulate the machines

They possess them Look

How the raw silk thread

Is pulled smoothly

From the factory woman’s fingers

Then dances endlessly

The factory is that way too

The axle of the spinning whee

Remembers

The molecules of steel

Hang their heads in the

Direction in which they spin

Then get caught up

Clanging emptily

When the moonlight pours in

It is not just the tide that is full
Emptily

Emptily

The spinning wheels spin

The threads swim

Through the abandoned factory

Translation by Jeffrey Angles