Your Marriage is Like Apollo 13

If someone said “Your marriage is like Apollo 13. 
You need to gather the duct tape, the plastic bags, 
all the tools to make a carbon scrubbing machine 
to clean the oxygen of your love so you can survive.” 
You would turn off that gadget, crawl into the compartment 
that is too small, and let the part that blew up fall away somewhere in outer space. 
And you still might blow yourselves to smithereens, 
but you also might find your way back, 
shaking and burning through the atmosphere, 
shaking your teeth loose,
hanging on to what’s left of the ship.
What a lesson then, learning to use what we have
instead of what we wish we had, 
making it all work
into a functioning thing, 
and making landfall in one piece. 
And in that joy of using everything we’ve got 
to keep the ship going we realize 
that to abandon it means we lose it all, 
and that is a death we won’t accept. 
(And we’re so glad we kept talking with Houston. 
Is that one of God’s names?)