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A Question of Ear One by one, the street lamps’ sodium purr clicks off as my neighbor’s half-ton coughs and revs, coughs, and finally turns over and he heads off, a gravel-tire churn as a gangsta rap bass line thumps from the cab, circles out like pond water after a stone’s plunk. “In the end it’s all a question of ear,” says Kierkegaard, meaning the next life: the next life as pure music, heaven’s harmonic resolve of Being’s sour arpeggio. But for now, suburbia is tuned to dream’s white noise, that octave three steps above wakefulness, the one right before the clock radio bleeps on and the percolator autogrinds, and the front door rehearses its slam.  ...

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