Shoulders How is it they are still so real? We see their shape in someone’s shoulders whose face is turned away. We feel a tumble in our tenses. Surely they have just stepped out or been caught up in traffic? And now the added revelations, the little things we should have known. Collaboratively, we build them with a vividness that life refused although its absence has become their working definition. Later over sandwiches we’ll tell their favourite jokes, each time a bit less well. Slowly, almost wilfully, they have withdrawn from us. Soon now we will stand about chatting in…