And that moment when the bird sings very close
To the music of what happens.

The lines evoke a fleeting convergence between art and lived reality: the bird’s song seems to align “very close” with “the music of what happens,” suggesting a moment when the world’s ordinary events feel patterned, meaningful, and almost composed. Heaney often writes about attention—how listening, looking, and remembering can turn the everyday into something charged and resonant. Here, “music” implies an underlying order or rhythm in experience, while “very close” preserves the sense that such harmony is rare and never fully graspable. The effect is to honor a brief, almost sacred clarity in which perception and event seem to coincide.