Six short lines, and in them a solemn spiritual discipline slides into a drinking party without anyone seeming to notice. That slide is the heart of "Mr. P.'s Zen." On the surface it is a small, deadpan anecdote about an evening spent sitting and toasting. Underneath, it asks what it means for a day's work to leave nothing behind, and whether emptiness is a goal to be reached through discipline or a condition that simply arrives at the end of a long day.
The first line plays on a real term. In Zen practice, *zazen* is seated meditation, and the word is built from *za*, "sitting," and *zen*. Bonta splits it in two and writes "I sat za zen," so the sitting is announced twice, once by the English verb and once inside the borrowed word. The effect is comic and slightly dizzy. The line behaves like a tongue-twister, or like a phrase that has been repeated so often it has lost its meaning. The next line flips the pieces: "we sat zen za." The word order is scrambled, but the sitting goes on. Notice too that "I" has become "we." The meditation that is usually solitary has turned into company, and the poem quietly shifts from practice to fellowship.
The sound carries much of the meaning here. The repeated *z* buzzes like a drone or a hum, the kind of sound meditation is often imagined to have, and it also sounds a little like the slurring of someone who has had a few drinks. By line 5 the word has shifted again. "Zen" has become "Zan," and "Mr. Zan" is a person to be toasted. A vowel change turns a philosophy into a man. We never learn whether Mr. Zan is a real companion, a joke, or the idea of Zen given a face. The title adds another layer: "Mr. P.'s Zen" makes the philosophy someone's personal property, a private and irreverent version rather than a textbook one. The poem doesn't explain who Mr. P. is, and it doesn't need to. The humor works as a character sketch of an unorthodox way of being at peace.
Structurally, the poem moves from clipped, almost chanted lines to plain speech. The opening pair is short and symmetrical, a verbal seesaw. Line 3, "we drank many healths," runs longer and loosens the rhythm, as if the gathering itself were relaxing. There is no regular rhyme scheme, but sound links hold the poem together. "Zen" and "Zan" nearly rhyme, "za" keeps echoing, and the open *a* of "sat," "za," and "Zan" gives the opening a rocking motion. "Healths" is also a slightly odd, old-fashioned plural. It suggests a ritual of toast after toast, each one a small ceremony, and it quietly rhymes in spirit with the idea of meditation as a ritual too.
The last two lines change the tone completely: "There was nothing at all left / of this day's work." The nonsense syllables are gone and the diction is flat and ordinary. The sentence can be read in several ways, and the ambiguity is what makes the poem linger. In a Zen register, "nothing at all left" suggests emptiness, a mind cleared of everything it carried. In a more earthly register, it is the ordinary feeling of an evening that has erased the day. The work has been drunk away, talked away, or sat away. Both readings may be true at once. The poem seems to suggest that the cleared mind of the monk and the cleared head of the reveler look much alike from the outside, and perhaps feel alike from inside.
The past tense matters here as well. "Sat," "drank," "was" make the poem a report, even a shrug, rather than a lesson. It doesn't tell us that emptiness is wisdom or that drinking is a failure of discipline. It lets the gap between them show, and lets us smile at it.
What makes the poem significant is how much it does with so little. It treats a spiritual idea with affection rather than reverence, and it shows that wordplay can be a way of thinking, not just a joke. A reader who arrives expecting either a sermon or a pure gag finds something in between: a tiny scene in which sitting, speaking, and drinking all end in the same quiet, cleared-out space.