Schwab's "Cancer" looks at a cancer hospital from the outside, and the view is cold. The buildings are clean, boxy and a little shapeless, giving off what the speaker calls the "atonal energy / of high tech." Inside, skilled people work quickly and carefully, yet the poem keeps pointing to what all that skill cannot do. Lasers and software can light up the body, but the sickness in the cells "did not succumb."
The speaker stays detached for most of the poem, using flat, clinical statements like "death came in regular fashion." That calm tone makes the facts feel harsher. Then the focus narrows to one patient, a woman alone at night, whose fear freezes her and throws her "into oblivion." It is the one moment of intense feeling.
The ending pulls back again. The hospital is "only an institution, an abstraction," unaware of what it has lost. The mood is bleak and quietly angry, and it suggests that efficiency is no comfort to the person who is dying.