December Twilight   It happened again — my shadow projected on the path beneath my feet. The woods had nothing to reveal. I turned, expecting light, the last of the sun, but I couldn’t make it out through the dense, lifeless tangle of bare branches — December twilight. This was where the ferns grew, where the birds sang, but that was summer. The coming of night casts shadows of its own, calls in its debts. These dusk projections — is this how the deer know where they shouldn’t go, is this what gets them through the seasons of hunters and fear, winter and its empty kitchen? I told myself that this was nothing — just the cold.     © Michael Fleming Brattleboro, Vermont January 2022