This is about what the dead men said:

At West Jefferson and Gallows Street, ring for me.
I will be inside, talking with the dead men.
“That’s the way we like it now,” they say,
but in my ears there is only the ringing, and a hint of significance.

The dead men are not interested in all that.
“Do you think,” they say, “that the new—will be the final rupture?”
You can’t hear what they say because the fumes from their pipes are too thick.
Their voices get lost, like servants in smoke in a burning manse.

(It was like the place we saw once with all the trees.
You cried and cried because you said the trees were all dead men.
You said that someone had stood them up along the driveway to shake their woody bones at you as you passed.)
The fog there was like their pipes, was what I was trying to say.

“It’s really more of a question of paradigms,” the dead men tell you.
You can see their paradigms hunched on the chairs behind them, sweaty teeth in the tops of the dead men’s heads.

“I’m quite pleased to be here,” will be the first of tonight’s lies.