Zen is usually pictured as austere: a straight back, a bare floor, a mind scrubbed clean. Dave Bonta's "Sitting" begins by shrugging at that picture. "My Zen," the speaker says, and the possessive makes it sound homemade, a private version assembled from whatever was at hand. What follows is six lines long, yet it moves from companionship to emptiness and suggests the two are less different than we assume.
The first stanza gives a short list of what this Zen consists of: "I drank with / a friend, then sat / long with a fish." The order is wry. Drinking comes first, and sitting follows as if it were the natural next step, which quietly undercuts any idea that spiritual attention needs solemn preparation. The poem never says what the fish is doing. It might be on a line, on a plate, or in a tank. Judging by the text, that vagueness seems deliberate. What matters is that the fish is a silent companion, one that offers no conversation and no advice, and the speaker sits "long" beside it. The word "long" opens its line and stretches the moment, and the line is almost entirely one-syllable words, so it reads slowly.
The second stanza turns on the phrase "The other day." This is how people mention something offhand, but here it introduces the poem's real event. The speaker sits "all alone," and the stanza is built to make that word fail. "Nothing—no form, / no answer—sat with me." The dashes hold the sentence open. For a moment "nothing" reads as a plain absence, a report that nothing happened. Then the verb arrives at the very end, and "nothing" becomes the subject, an actual presence taking a seat. The speaker is alone and still accompanied, and the accompanying thing is emptiness itself.
The poem does this through one small repeated structure. "Sat with" appears in different forms across the poem, attached first to a friend (by way of "drank with"), then to a fish, then to nothing. The pattern sets the three companions on a single scale. A friend is the easy case, a fish a stranger one, and nothing the strangest. Because the grammar stays the same, the last one doesn't feel like a leap. The speaker has simply kept going down the list.
The phrase "no form, / no answer" is also worth slowing down for. "Form" has Buddhist echoes: the idea that form and emptiness are bound up with each other is a familiar teaching, though the poem never insists on it. "No answer" points toward the Zen riddle, the question that is meant to resist solving. The speaker does not describe enlightenment or even peace. The sitting yields no insight, and the poem treats that lack as the point.
Formally, the poem is free verse. There is no rhyme and no regular meter. Its music comes from sound and line breaks instead. The *f* sounds of "friend," "fish" and "form" link the three most important nouns across both stanzas, while the repeated "sat" works like a drumbeat. The breaks are careful too. Ending a line on "sat" leaves the word hanging, so for a beat the speaker is just sitting, with no companion yet named. Stanza one is made of short lines, and stanza two lengthens with "The other day I sat all alone," which gives the second half a slightly more confessional, spoken rhythm.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it gets from so little. It could have been a solemn meditation on emptiness. Instead it keeps a light, almost joking tone, and the joke carries real feeling. Being with someone, whether a friend, a fish or nothing at all, becomes a matter of staying put and paying attention, not of understanding. After the dashes, the loneliness of "all alone" no longer holds. The last three words, "sat with me," are warm, and that warmth is the poem's quiet surprise.