Seen at a Gate (was House Poor) - edit4

[dukealien]

edit;
House Poor

I passed an old man chipping at a fence
of iron, slowly scaling off its rust,
and wondered what had brought this codger thence–
could he be destitute, so poor he must
perform odd jobs to earn his bread today?
Or was he house-poor, working on his own
last residence because he couldn’t pay
a younger man to help, so scraped alone?
That place was nice; no cheaper home, like mine,
has fences so demanding or so fine.

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Thanks for your excellent critique.  In the revision, I've tried to ease the reading... though I did retain one or two phrases you found objectionable.

For example, I've altered lines 9-10 to reverse the logic and place "has" at the beginning of l. 10 instead of the stronger "boasts" which was leading me to read it,  BOASTS NO fence SO de MAN ding OR so FINE, varying away from strict iambic.  The same thing does happen at the beginning of l. 7, but I kept it for its little joke "..ON his OWN/LAST RE si DENCE..." as the meaning of l. 6 changes with what follows.

Not really a dizain, since it doesn't follow the prescribed rhyme scheme... perhaps a Shakespearean sonnet with the third quatrain missing 

Very glad the nuances/possible symbolism or philosophy came through!

Enjoyable and captivating.  An interesting rhyming scheme for a decasyllabic dizain.  It reads relatively smooth for me.  I do struggle slightly with lines 7 and 8.  I tended to catch on "Last" for the fist few readings, and after working through that, the three multi syllable words in a line contrasting with the rest of the lines made it feel much smaller than ten syllables.  I still sometimes accidentally throw in a "he" for the eighth line.  Possibly subconsciously feeling a need for more syllables from the previous line. Since the name of the poem is "House Poor" I wonder if it is beneficial contemplating if the man is just doing an odd job.  Could you use those two lines and illustrate the arduous labor the elderly man is engaged in?  If iambic pentameter is the design then I struggle on how to scan the final line that way.  BOASTS no FENCE so de MAND ing or so FINE. Via the rule of three you could emphasize the "or".  If you leave the "or" deemphasized then you could stress the "de" along with "mand" creating a double iamb and technically it could be IP, but no matter how many times I read it this line does not feel or sound iambic to me.  The last line is great, and I cannot help but extrapolate a meaning of nicer things are more demanding things, and to project that to entities other than houses.  In a good way this poem leaves me wanting more.  Should you want to continue this theme I would be interested in another dizain where the narrator conjectures about the furnishings and possessions, or lack thereof, inside the home.