Ten words, and a small comedy of the spirit fits inside them. The title, "Zazen," names seated Zen meditation, and the first line, "morning Zen," sets the hour and the discipline. Then the speaker breaks in: "I would be a pear / on her mat." Someone, a woman, is meditating, and the speaker wishes to be reduced to a piece of fruit resting in her space. The central idea is a tangle of two impulses. Zen practice aims at quieting the self, yet this wish for self-erasure is full of personality. Wanting to be a pear is wanting to be close to her, and perhaps to be noticed by her.
The pivot is the small word "would." It is not "I am" or "I will be" but a conditional, the grammar of daydreaming. The speaker is not meditating, or at least not well. A mind that has settled into zazen would not be composing wishes. The poem catches him in the act of failing at stillness, and it is gently funny about it.
The pear is a well-chosen object. It is round, heavy at the bottom and narrower at the top, a shape that sits down by itself, much like a person seated on the floor. It is also entirely passive. A pear does not fidget or wander off in thought, so it has the very quality the speaker lacks. Its sweetness gives the wish a trace of sensuality, though the poem never says so. Notably, the poem avoids the apple, which carries centuries of symbolic baggage. The pear is humbler and more domestic, and the wish is lighter for it. There may also be a pun in "pear," which sounds like "pair." If so, the line quietly admits what the speaker really hopes for: to be one of two beside her. That reading is an inference from the sound, but the poem's compactness makes it hard to ignore.
The construction is as spare as the subject. The lines run three syllables, then five, then three, so the middle line is the longest and carries the whole confession, while the first and last are brief frames. There is no end rhyme and no punctuation at all. The only capital letters are on "Zen" and the pronoun "I," which sets the tradition and the self side by side, and the self is the one being asked to shrink. The line break after "Zen" works like a pause for breath before the surprise. The sounds are quiet, too. "Morning" and "mat" begin with the same soft *m*, so the poem opens and closes on the same sound, as if the day and the mat were one enclosed space. The *r* in "morning," "pear," and "her" runs through the lines like a low hum, a sound that suits meditation.
The poem also moves its attention in three steps. The first line is impersonal, a scene with no people in it. The second brings in "I," and the third brings in "her." The speaker is wedged between the setting and the woman, which is where his wish puts him. The poem ends on "mat," the lowest point in the room. We never learn what she looks like or whether she knows he is there. She appears only as a possessive, "her," present and withheld at once, like someone absorbed in a practice that is turned inward, away from him. That leaves an ambiguity about the pear's position. It might be set before her as an object for contemplation, or beneath her as something to sit on. Either way, the speaker wants to be a thing, not a watcher.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it holds in so little. It treats a serious tradition with respect and makes a joke of human longing at the same moment, and neither cancels the other. It also hints at a real paradox: the wish to disappear is itself a strong form of wanting. The poem does not resolve this, and its own brevity is the closest it comes to the stillness the speaker envies. Nothing is added to the scene that doesn't need to be there, which is perhaps what a pear on a mat would do.