Francis Scudellari's «And there will be no» hands its title straight to its first line: "And there will be no / praise for Folly, Erasmus, from these lips." The sentence starts before we realise it has started, which suits a poem about how little we can claim to know. Erasmus wrote a famous satire in which Folly herself does the talking, so the speaker's refusal sounds like a quarrel with foolishness. By the end, the poem suggests the quarrel is more tangled than it first looks.
The scene is small. The speaker picks up a rock from "the spoiled ground I walk," near hopscotch squares "chalked / to dare jumps." The "lips" that won't praise Folly turn out to be fingertips, "the tips / of fingers I've let linger without expertise." Touch takes over from speech, and the verb "tease" does two jobs, meaning both to coax information out of the rock and to play with it. The speaker admits to a feeling "less feeling than desire," a hesitant, almost embarrassed curiosity.
What the rock gives back is mostly silence. Its "smooth brown whisper / hints at lost red," a lovely detail, since the colour suggests a history without revealing it. The speaker then lists what is unknown in a run of negatives: "not what gravity of years; not / the great weight of a wait uncounted; not the slow / or sudden forces that freed it." The line breaks cut right through these phrases, so the sentence keeps tipping forward, and "weight" and "wait" sound identical, so the heaviness of the rock and the heaviness of time blur together. Then comes a plain admission: "I don't know / any of it."
After this the poem turns comic. The speaker is "not as foolish as" a French academic who claimed to know what makes a studied people "different," in a region "others had named." Naming a place, the poem hints, is not the same as knowing it. The speaker immediately drops from scholarship to a taco chain "expert in making flavorless burritos," and the sudden fall in register punctures the grand claim. The poem then offers a mock boast about "the plastic bear," a honey container that is now "better at holding air / than the honey leaving it." The bear is a small joke about expertise, since the one thing it truly knows how to hold is nothing. The word "expert" echoes through the poem, from "without expertise" to the burritos to the end, and each time it is tested against what a person can actually know.
The sound of the poem supports this modesty. There are rhymes, such as lips/tips, expertise/tease, rock/walk and bear/air, but they arrive like small accidents. Some are slant (claimed/same, bravado/burritos), some hide inside a line (dare/bare), and the long, run-on lines never settle into a regular beat. The effect is of someone thinking aloud and tripping over sound as they go, and it matches a speaker who won't pretend to polish.
The ending is the poem's best moment. "I also like this rock, and what / matter it's expert in." "Matter" works as both substance and importance, so the rock is allowed the one kind of expertise the humans lacked: being exactly what it is. Then the last line gives the only claim the poem will stand behind: "It's this rock, until it's not." The words are short and blunt, and "rock" and "not" chime back to the earlier "rock / walk." The line is a tautology, but it also admits that the rock is slowly changing, since the same "slow / or sudden forces" that freed it will one day undo it.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it replaces praise with liking. Folly, in Erasmus's book, is a smooth talker who praises herself, and the speaker refuses that role. But getting fond of a pebble could be called a gentle folly of its own, and the poem lets that irony sit there. It suggests that honest knowledge may be as small as what is in your hand right now, and that this is enough to be getting on with.