Ivory Without Elephants

A small workshop in Albany, New York, on a winter evening, snow on the dark window, warm yellow light from a kerosene lamp, beside a foot-driven wooden lathe two hands in rolled white shirt sleeves weighing a freshly turned ball five point seven centimetres across, matt cream-white with a faintly grainy surface of fine bone particles in a smooth binder, against an older ball of polished yellowish ivory in the other hand, on the worn bench a shallow bowl of grey-white bone meal, a stoppered clear glass bottle of syrupy collodion with a blank paper label, curls of pale shavings on the wood, a green cloth billiard table soft in the background.