how to clean up broken glass

i get on my knees. is this too
a kind of worship? it was my mother
who first taught me how to clean up
broken glass. i forget who knocked
over the dish, me or her. we are a family
of accidents. a father in another city.
a rocking chair on mars & the telescopes
we use to find one another. dinner plate moons
gone fracture. she would wet two towels.
one for me & one for her. then we worked,
lifting as many slivers as we could from the floor. 
daggers or jack knives stuck in the cloth.
i have always been too bold. i pick up
the big pieces with my bare fingers
even when all my loved ones tell me not to.
sharks' teeth or waxing gibbous. there is
no good place to take a fragment. i would know
because i am made of them. an unlocked door.
a car crash at midday. your laughter 
without me on a phone call with god. 
i imagine a magnificent plate knit together
from all the broken ones. monstrously 
mismatched. nothing like kintsugi.
this is the making of a vessel that leaks
everything i hold slowly escapes. the trick is
that there is not trick. you will always find
another chip from the plate or the glass
weeks or even years later. every once i awhile
they will cut you. sitting on the lip
of the tub, staring at my heel. i pinch.
remove the freckle of glass. hold it in
my own palm like a compass wing. i wish
i broke them on purpose. that i was 
a bull animal in a mirror house. but for us
shattering is always an accident. 
something lost. our we always to blame
for how we break? i keep what i can
of the whole. this, a vocation.