This last section of Fontegaia chapt. 3 (#26, below) is a wee bit murky, even for me. May have to work on that...

Chapt. 3 is the (planned, anyway) middle part of a 5-part poem. Fontegaia is an attempt to explore certain historical, geographical, religious, political, & poetic phenomena through the lens of Siena (civic murals & artworks, the Palio horserace, local saints & other historical figures, & so on).

Elements of the city sort of shift around - like a lens focusing on different facets - in order to represent lots of other things (beyond Siena itself). If I write about the semi-mythical river "Diana" (which the medieval Sienese, always in need of a better water-supply, went searching for beneath their hilltops) - at the same time I may be writing about the moon (Diana was a moon-goddess), about other rivers (Mississippi, Jordan, Amazon, Nile), about searching for "the source" of things, about baptism (in the "font" or the spring), about masculine/feminine (& psychological) aspects of religious iconography ... - etc. etc.

Chapt. 3 (as you can see if you've been following along) focuses in particular on Diana/moon/river-sources. (As chapt. 2 focused on the Palio, and the 1st chapter on the Lorenzetti murals & other art.)

As I finish new chapters, they've been added to the Fontegaia work-in-progress, in the book titled Rest Note. Chapt. 3 will be added soon, I hope.

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Also, I think, if you want to understand what I'm trying to do here, you'd want to see Fontegaia as the culmination of a longer "quatrain" train (as I've mentioned before). Stubborn Grew - the 1st book of Forth of July - opens with the poet-speaker looking down from Prospect Park at the "local Rhine" (the Providence River). The Providence, the Blackstone, the Mississippi, the Amazon, the Nile, the Jordan, the little spring rainwater streams that run down Arthur St. in Mendelssohn (Hopkins, MN), & various Russian rivers, all play a very big symbolic role in Forth of July & some of the quatrain-sequences which followed it (like Rest Note).

I could be wrong, but I do feel I am drawing toward the close of this particular long streak of writing. So it's culminating around this little fountain (the Fontegaia) in the main town plaza of Siena (the Campo), over the supposed location of the underground tunnels & channels of the mythical Diana River.