The Jewelers

My job is to deliver packages
To swank displays uptown at Tiffany
Or the jostle down on Forty-seventh Street.
My favorite stop is the Brazilian’s workshop,
Up on the ninth floor of an old building
Whose elevators are iron cauldrons
When fun summer stews the city in smog.
I like to show up at his place to talk.
I make up an excuse to tell my boss—
Instructions for a setting or some such—
And walk the two blocks through bustling Hasids
Who pass around fat wallets of diamonds
As casually as if they’re sharing lunch.

Haraldo will be at his bench, a loupe
Wedged in his eye socket, plying metal.
He looks so appealingly Old Worldy:
His Latin good looks, the tools of his trade
Around him in harmonious chaos.
Haraldo may be suave, but he’s smart too.
He waxes eloquent about his art,
Reads a lot, and plays piano with friends
In a trio out in Port Jefferson.
His thinly veiled contempt for customers
Is one of his endearing traits—he hates
How most look at his work as an adjunct
To gems and cash. “Settings are crowns,” he says.
He might hold up an emerald in the crevice
On the back of his hand between two fingers
And dandle it in daylight by a window,
Its color shining out like Irish grass,
Or green fire from Venus an astronaut
Trapped and transported, its coals intact.
“See? You have to make it look easy,”
He says. “Hide the defects and angle the light.”

One day I found Haraldo there with Jain,
A youngish Indian who lives in Queens,
Polite and soft-spoken, always with a bag
Of goodies—star sapphires, black pearls, garnets
From Russia, deep green, called demantoid
(You tell them by the horsetail shapes inside),
And rubies Jain calls, rolling his r’s
And flashing a smile, “Burma. Guaranteed.”
Haraldo had his blue smock on, and he
Was sweating like he’d been welding car parts.
Jain’s head was down like someone had just died,
Which someone almost had. In Jain’s building
A dealer had been robbed the night before,
His safe left empty as a bachelor’s fridge.
“He was the last jeweler to go home,” Jain said.
“Gun held to his head . . . Bound and gagged till morning . . .
Young guy too . . . Wife and kids . . . You never know . . .”

Jain paused, his face and white shirt totally drenched
With sweat, his manner steady-as-you-go.
Haraldo, meanwhile, seemed about to snap—
A combination of the news and heat.

“You got to think the chances that we take,”
He said, glancing at his bench’s bunch
Of old-cut diamonds from an antique brooch,
Their idiosyncratic shapes a play
Of polar light sequestered in ozone.
“I work alone here evenings sometimes too.”
He picked up a diamond. “It’s just a rock,”
He said, “but it bamboozles simple want
With greed. That’s what they used to call its virtue,
A power in it we don’t understand
That makes men go nuts and kill each other.”

Only the guys with charming accents can
Get away with adding the mystic spin.
“Here we go,” I said, winking at Jain.
“Haraldo’s mumbo-jumbo gemstone lore.
How about they go nuts for money, basta?”

But sometimes when I start on a package
Back in the office mailroom, Haraldo’s
Asides make me think or at least amused.
Say there’s a pile of brilliants for pavé,
Like crumbs sprinkled from a dragon’s mouth.
Or Burmese rubies the size of thumbnails,
Whose truest red only appears by angling—
I mean that in the fishing sense, as in
Lures and a line cast into a clear stream.
The color blazes when the light is caught.