Hidden Places (or my winter as a flower bulb)

My mother tends to sleep into the day
(sometimes until noon)
during December.
She awakes like tree branches
after a heavy snow,
slowly dusting off the dead dreams
before their bodies cool completely
into fossils;
she wants there to be nothing left
for the anthropologists.

This is why she is always the photographer,
our family portraits consistently
Incomplete. She stands back several yards
and adjusts the aperture.
We want to be remembered for our invisibility;
We are ice before water.