I Wrap Myself in Elizabethtown

For Elizabethtown, Kentucky

I wrap myself in Elizabethtown,

a winter trench coat cinched at the waist

by Interstate Sixty-Five, and I

am warm in a classic American story

with a glass of bourbon in my hand,

toasting the past and an inclement sky.

This warm fleece lining, a Lincoln wedding,

Thomas taking Sarah Bush Johnson

to be the step-mom of little Abe,

the boy who would grow to know storm

as his legacy. The tough outer fabric,

Gabardine, resistant to even the most

insistent of gloomy cold-rain forecasts

is made of hybrid automobile economy:

windshields, brakes, and the durable frames

of Ford-150s. And now two EV

battery plants: insurance against

the fickle clouds of the marketplace.

Starlet Jenny Lind alone sang

chic epaulets onto these shoulders

from the steps of General Custer’s home.

The pocket flaps, sleeve loops,

collar hooks, such painstaking detail

all sewn in miserable conditions

by the ruthless machine of the Civil War.

All wars are default designers,

fashioning the future with slashing cut,

following up with bind and backstitch.

The genius of the back vent slit

makes for ease of movement among

the many downtown historical markers

preserving the ballad, promoting the brand.

Fastened to the inside collar

right between the shoulder blades,

in the place of the dry clean only tag,

there is a cannonball in the wall

marked by an arrow mounted on

Eric A. Bates Attorney at Law’s

whitewashed office in the center of things,

sacrament of General John Hunt Morgan’s

mission to burn the train track trestles

and stop the flow of Union supplies,

merely a hiccup in the march of the blue coats.

We know the ending, the wrap-up in tissue,

packaged, mailed to the neighborhoods of freedom.

The trench coat, now a fashion piece,

was born for war, and from war’s ravages

found a way to reinvent itself

into an icon of the runway model,

now for a dash through a winter squall,

now for a fancy night on the town,

dinner at Waters Edge Winery & Bistro,

craft ice cream afterwards at The Dreamery,

bundled up warm for a late walk-around.

NOTES

—Thomas Lincoln married his second wife Sarah Bush Johnson in Elizabethtown on December 2, 1819.

—Two electric vehicle battery plants are being built in Elizabethtown. The first is scheduled to open in 2025. The second, originally scheduled to open in 2026, is now delayed.

—Swedish opera sensation Jenny Lind on tour with PT Barnum performed on the steps of the Pusey House (where General Custer had once temporarily lived) during a stagecoach stop through town.

—The cannonball in the wall is a famous tourist feature of downtown. Originally fired by Confederate General John Hunt Morgan’s troops when taking Elizabethtown on route to sabotage a major train supply route for the Union, the cannonball lodge in the upper story of the Depp building, which later burned to the ground in 1887. The cannonball was recovered by town resident Annie Nourse. Years later, when a new building was erected on the spot, the cannonball was placed in the wall as near the spot of its original embedding, and now adorns the law offices of Eric A. Bates.

—Waters Edge Winery and Bistro and The Dreamery are fine eateries in downtown Elizabethtown today.