IVORY
by Sara Backer

One elephant tooth yields three fine quality billiard balls.

A seven pound scrivello chopped into eight blocks,
fit into a chuck in a lathe, clasped by a metal ring.
One hemisphere turns after another.
 
Tropic of Capricorn, Tropic of Cancer. A parting tool
scrapes off the equatorial band. Cuttings and shavings
swept into the bazaar as bangles, polishing dust, jelly, ink.
Our earliest history is a riddle carved in ivory:
 
an ibex, a woman, and a mammoth.
A goat’s curved horn carved on reindeer horn—irony?
A woman naked but for necklace and bracelet—vanity?
A sketch of the giant-tusked enemy—totem? warning?
 
Busts and masks and plaques and saddles, jewelry caskets,
brush handles, tobacco graters, crucifixes, tankards, combs,
chess pieces, piano keys, and billiard balls herded inside a triangle
waiting for the cue to trigger crazy spinning paths,
 
all emerged from the trinity
of ibex, woman, mammoth.
To kill, to mate, and to be killed,
adorned with gratuitous caroms and ricochets.
 
The world of ivory is a curve, an arc of decadence
that drops in death, and death that rotates into story,
cut in the teeth of extinction
on the rotting cusp of glory.

an earlier version was published in The Poet's Touchstone

 
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