The last poem was inspired (some would question that, of course) after I found a small box turtle in the middle of the road in front of our house. He must have been about 5 inches from nose to tail; he kept his head and feet out all the time I held him. He was a perfect turtle: red striped head, perfect little reptilian head and feet, solid, clean, patterned, uncracked shell.
Since some people think it sport to hit turtles on the road, I wanted to make him (her/it) a little safer. Mary and I used to put road turtles in the garden, but our current dog pack (Jack Russell Terrier, Dachshund, and Beagle) and cat can find anything that moves out there, so I put him way up from the road in the front yard in a wild section. When I picked him up and looked closely at him I saw his perfection.
Inspiration, such as I get, comes from my encounter with things such as the turtle and the maxim I discovered from Charles Williams: "This also is Thou; neither is this Thou." The only way one can discover the truth of this maxim is by attending to the things, for things have the first requirement of images: that is, identity. This turtle is; this turtle has being. Thus the turtle could reveal God; the turtle obviously conceals God. (The philosophical materialist would say that there is only the turtle, only matter and that mind is merely an offshoot of the way matter works.) For most of us, myself included, I see turtle, yet the beauty and perfection of this particular turtle does indeed do what images do: it points beyond itself to the idea of beauty and perfection manifested in a turtle. There is such a thing in our minds as turtleness (Plato territory, I think); if there weren't we couldn't tell a turtle from an aardvark or an aardvark from our wife. Obviously I believe mind is more real than matter but that one might move significantly from matter to mind.
Too many words. One should think and then write, and then rewrite, etc. Okay. Things are expressive. Writing about them is one way of discovering what any particular thing might mean. That is the simple version of the above.