A face is a face, no matter how it’s painted.

Bones, and the deep heart, underlie this passion.

I would be blind if too closely acquainted

With every mood or look features can fashion.

Wise eyes see that blindness comes with rolling,

And fluttering obscures the warmest gazes;

Wise ears can hear—without silence controlling

A word of it—each word that love amazes.

Our love is free. Habits have not created

Your natures, which can set my heart a-doting,

Woman or man. Nothing in you has defeated

My love, and my love needs to defeat nothing.

Because we’ve sounded honest depths for pleasure,

Time will not hinder us or hurt this treasure.

In the game of bouts-rimes, the same rhyming words are supplied to a group of poets. In 2004 I was asked to contribute to Fashioned Pleasures, an anthology of bouts-rimes based on rhymes from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 20.