LANDLORD was first published in The Asheville Poetry Review (Vol 3, Number 2, Fall/Winter issue, 1996.)

       LANDLORD

As a king’s public room
Needs the assistance of a chair,
His house needs the height of a hill
To assist the public mind.
The downcast upward look
Is a hill’s requisition
No less than a chair’s claim
Plus the hill’s supplement.
Once in our county lived a king
Who sat daily on the veranda
Of his house in fat fame,
Not knowing he had succeeded:
Joiner of mule and plow,
Hairy harrower, lord of the laden
Haywain, scythe, and enfilading file,
He sat, ignorant of elevation
Reigning under the bulk
Of his noticeability, atop the hill
Like a great frog prince laid back
In his high, hand-hammered chair,
His hands like lilypads
On the ponds of his knees, looking down
Because we were looking up
Into the great groin of his greatness,
Unblinking. We did not know whether
He ever blinked or smiled because
We could not look that far,
And approach was forbidden.
He ruled our lives thus
In his hundred weights, guessed at
Until he died: then we went and made
Him obeisance underived:

But this only after they had sawed
Another door beside the other to tilt
The coffin through: from downhill it looked,
We said, like a cruising cattle car.
Two teams tandem were enough
To get the catafalque to church,
And a dozen prime tenants with pulleys, ropes,
And chains to drop him in his grave.
"The king is dead!" we exulted,
Throwing our roses down.

©George Scarbrough, 1996.

George Scarbrough comments: "County landlords seemed likest God, who, I was told, owned the whole world. Among the many landlords we served as itinerant sharecroppers, there was one belike the size of God. He sat uphill in his house, in a special hand-built chair to hold him, and looked down on all he owned, including us children who played in the red dust at the foot of the hill, but were never allowed to approach him. After a while he died, as all gods—and tenant children—must. His absence made a great gap in the horizon....but let the poem tell that in black and white."