The title plays on the idea of sign language, where hands speak without a voice. Here the speaker imagines their own hands "talking" about them, and what they say is bleak: the speaker is "as full of life as a grave." It's a flat, unsparing self-judgment, as if the body itself were giving testimony against its owner.
The second part turns to what hands can do. They can kill, and when they do, they "go still," which suggests a link between violence and a kind of deadness that spreads back to the one who commits it. Then comes the last line: love is "the trade they never want." Hands are usually tied to work and skill, so calling love a trade the hands refuse makes it sound like a job the speaker can't or won't take up. The poem seems to confess to a numbness, a failure to reach toward others. The mood is cold, spare, and quietly ashamed, with very little comfort offered.