BENJAMIN GOLUBOFF

Luis Medina, Plastic-Covered Tree Near Lawrence and Kenmore, Chicago, 1984. Silver dye-bleach print.

A rope descends into the frame
implying workers above on a platform
who have thrown a plastic sheet
over a little tree at the composition’s center.
They’re cleaning the building’s facade
and have rubbed a white soapy paste
into the stonework behind the tree.

Medina was interested in the play of white tones here:
the soap on the facade, the tree’s white bark
where it shows through the plastic sheet
and where it does not, how white light is caught
in the sheet where it folds, released where it does not.
Also in the posture of the little tree
bowed under the weight of the sheet
as if it were begging or praying for something.
Also in the suggestion of craftsmanship
and care on the part of the workers.

Today, summer 2022, the tree is standing dead,
a mature white poplar next to a line of shingle oaks
the new developer put in.

Benjamin Goluboff is the author of Ho Chi Minh: A Speculative Life in Verse and Biking Englewood: An Essay on the White Gaze, both from Urban Farmhouse Press. Goluboff teaches at Lake Forest College. Some of his work can be read at https://www.lakeforest.edu/academics/faculty/goluboff