The poem seems to set a scene at a chapel, where the ground around it is filled with the dead. The speaker calls the failure to notice them "a sin," as if walking past without attention is a moral lapse. The title, "Clueless," hints at the same idea: the living move through this place without really understanding it.
The dead, the speaker suggests, might once have believed in "one true exchange," some real meeting or moment of meaning, and now they cannot have it. The living respond badly. Out of fear, they prepare "ready answers and little tales," small comforts that keep death at a distance. The last image is strange and a little dark: old doctors return, and death itself hands out "scarfs and gloves," as though it were a polite host looking after us.
The mood is uneasy and quietly reproachful. The speaker feels guilt, and also a sharp awareness of how people hide from mortality.