The title borrows the language of wedding vows, "to have and to hold," but the poem gives those words to a pair of hands rather than to a whole person. The speaker seems to be looking at someone's hands, apparently a woman's, and imagining them as the part of her that loves and commits. The hands "ask / always to marry," as though they were making a proposal of their own.
The language is spare and slightly puzzling, which fits the way the poem moves like a thought half-formed. "End and band" suggests a ring, and perhaps also the way a marriage has both a finish and a binding. The last lines undercut the grand promise: "always to live / and have 20 other things." After the solemn vows, the ordinary clutter of life rushes in. The mood is tender and quietly playful, a little wondering, and it suggests that devotion is made of small physical gestures as much as big declarations.